Is hosting important for SEO? Host related sites on separate IP?

[never4ever]

Gurus,

I have several web sites, each addressing a certain sub-niche of my niche. Currently they are on the same server, sharing the same IP. I'm thinking about moving the sites to separate accounts, each having a different C-class IP address.

My question is, would the additional inconvenience and expense worth the trouble, from the SEO point of view?

Thank you!

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, never4ever.

Over the years, there's been a lot of talk about separate IPs, separate C-blocks, etc. Most of it came from people who hoped to get their cross-linking past Google detection. So, if the sites have already been served on the same IP, then Google already knows about their relationship.

If you're not hoping to keep the relationship under the radar and you work to follow Google guideliines, then I don't see any ranking advantage to separate IP addresses - and certainly not something important enough to go to the trouble of moving things around.

I work with one group of related sites that have been developed since 1993 (yes, that old!) The owner has several IP addresses on three different C-blocks. Over the years, they've expreimented with launching new sites on shared IPs and on unique IPs. It just doesn't seem to be a major factor, if any factor at all.

From what I've seen, to rank competitively you still need backlinks from sites that you don't own.

[edited by: tedster at 12:04 am (utc) on May 24, 2010]

[never4ever]

Thank you, tedster!

[indyank]

From what I've seen, to rank competitively you still need backlinks from sites that you don't own.

If the sites are on separate IPs how, in your opinion, does google seem to know the relationship?

[tedster]

There are many direct and indirect ways. Directly, there's Whois information. Indirectly, there are other types of "footprints", most especially linking patterns that almost jump out at Google from their complete webgraph and their analysis of what is the statistical norm

I'm not saying it's impossible to stay under Google's radar. More that it's really not much of an advantage, either. If your links are built mostly by cross-linking between your own properties, that's going to be clear and the links may be devalued. Not penalized, just devalued or even ignored in more extreme cases.

So it still takes the kind of truly independent links that I mentioned earlier to compete for real. In recent years, many spammers turned to longer phrases instead of creating a direct attack on the most competitive queries.

[internetheaven]

Most of it came from people who hoped to get their cross-linking past Google detection

You say this like it is a bad thing? If I have four language variants of a site then I will buy four country specific tlds to host them and interlink those four sites. I have to do this because of Google's geo-algorithm-problems. I therefore have to host on separate IPs and fudge the whois is a little otherwise Google thinks I'm trying to scam it somehow.

Creating 20 sites on "home widgets" and interlinking them in the hope of gaining several of the top SERPs all to myself is a spammy purpose, sure. Wanting one site to rank on four different Google search properties is normal behaviour in my opinion. They would want me to run 4 separate Adwords campaigns from the same Adwords account wouldn't they? There would be no penalty from the PPC department for having a landing page that linked out to the different languages.

This is the problem with Google "penalties" rather than filters. It's Google's algorithm which makes it so difficult for a single site to rank across different languages using just subdomains or folders. They are doing better separating subdomains than they used to but it's still a long way off. My interlinking is simply "internal navigation" that happens to spread across 4 sites. ;)

Is hosting important for SEO? Host related sites on separate IP?

If the question is not about interlinking, then I would have to say that a separate IP is not necessary. Similar sites with similar whois can rank individually if, as tedster says, the backlink profiles are quite different.

[seoN00B]

To answer your question - Yes. It is very important & effective on my campaigns been using that for the last 4 years.

As far as i know Google wont read whois information.

[curioustoddler]

there are other types of "footprints", most especially linking patterns that almost jump out at Google

Tedster,
I need to ask you something about this. I am not talking about cross linking but linking pattern. If i have an old site and a new site but both of them have 70% of their backlinks from same sites( almost 500 sites in the same trade and linking to other sites as well) then how will google treat this.

[tedster]

It's one of many factors, but it is the kind of "footprint" I'm talking about. The differentiator is the 30% of baacklinks that differ between the two sites. If there are some solid sites in that 30%, then you're probably fine. It's natural for links to cluster within a market niche.

But if the 30% that differ are low quality, then you probably will have a struggle ranking well.