All sites on one Sitemaps account - possible penalties?

[mihomes]

So I am in the process of adding a php cron job which auto creates an updated sitemap on all my sites. Along with this I am adding the sitemap to my google account, authenticating it with google, and pinging google when it updates.

Here in lies the question - will Google penalize me, or perform different treatment since ALL of my sites will be listed under the same Google account?

I can just see it now... one account with 40 websites about blue widgets. Google then drops all the site listing from the serps or lowers page rank because they are all similar under the same webmaster account.

The amount of data Google is collecting about people is just insane anymore. Basically they will now have a pretty good list of who owns what websites or at the minimum who maintains them... and its all right there when you use sitemaps or any of the webmaster tools.

[edited by: tedster at 5:42 pm (utc) on Jan. 18, 2007]

[netmeg]

Do you have 40 sites that are each about blue widgets?

I have 62 sites in my Google account (and some more to add when I get time) between my sites and my clients, but none of them are related to each other, nor do they cover the same topics. I haven't had any problems that I can trace back to that.

[mihomes]

Well, they are all geared at a specific market, however, the 'products' are basically the same if not the same.

For instance, say I sell widgets. One site might be targeted at blue widgets, another at red widgets, while others might be for home users interested in widgets, companies interested in widgets, etc. Get the drift?

My own belief is that Google, Yahoo, and soon MSN would not exploit this information in any way as it would be morally wrong. They want you to conform to standards yet the catch 22 is they penalize you for doing so. So I don't see how they could use your sitemaps under an account as a means to punish you.

The question is will they or won't they? It instantly flashed in my head as I started adding the sitemaps to my google account.

[jimbeetle]

The question is will they or won't they?

Only the folks at G can answer that for sure. Anything said here would merely be supposition. So, I might as well suppose ;-).

I suppose that Google has multiple ways of telling sites that are related: Whois info, any Google account services such as AdSense, AdWords, Froogle, SiteMaps, GoogleBase, etc. And there are those little notebooks that Matt and other Googlers carry to conferences (Main site URL? E-mail address? Good, now we can talk.)

I also suppose it has a bunch of technical and algorithmical tools in its belt, and I suppose it would be able to suss out, if not absolute same ownership of sites, at least very closely related sites.

I guess I'm first saying that if you're worried about Google knowing about common ownership, you might consider other ways it can figure things out besides SiteMaps.

Would G use this to penalize you in your situation? I think it would depend on the signals of quality each individual site sends.

unique content

no heavy interlinking among sites

independent set of external backlinks for each site

and all the other things that make a good site

Matt Cutts has said similar things a few times: It wouldn't be ownership of multiple sites itself that hurts, but common ownership coupled with negative signals of quality.

[mihomes]

Yes, I am aware of the 'rules' regarding dupe content, uniqueness, etc... heck I've been doing this my whole life.

It's just one of those things that struck me as odd as does other things Google releases. I try to think of them 'as if' I owned them and what I would have access to. If you look at Google's stuff in this manner you will see that they are just loooooaded with information yet supposedly that is never the purpose of the service(s).

Just a quick pondering and wanted to see what everyone else though about it... that is all.