Forum Moderators: open
This will give me a fixed amount of space and bandwidth and the option to host unlimited domains for my friends.
I'm guessing that many of my friends will link to one or more of my existing sites, and I'll likely link back. And yes, I really am serious about this being friends, rather than simply being coy about setting up a bunch of dummy sites all linking to me.
I'm curious, though, whether the fact that these will all be VIRTUALLY hosted will matter. I'm guessing that Google must have something in place to penalize link farms (unscrupulous Webmasters buying up a bunch of domains and pointing them at each other), and thus take into account whether a group of domains pointing to each other are all on the same IP or IP range, right?
Or does Google not really care, preferring just to assume that a scamster has to share PR with himself anyway, so in the end it doesn't really matter?
In the end, I'm really trying to just help my friends (many of whom are artists with little cash), and I don't care about gaining substantial amounts of Google Juice. But I sure don't want to LOSE Google Juice on my main site!
Thanks in advance for any insight you're able to offer.
Only my opinion.
Gus
None of the domains I'd be hosting would be anywhere near duplicates, and would share little more than occasional links in common.
The big question, then, still remains whether Google's PR takes into account underlying IP addresses.
This of course is assuming that I know what my PR should be, and what it should pass on, etc. etc.
But from what I can tell if there is a penalty it is a small one.
(Fwiw - I'm not a crosslinker!)
I'm very sure that PageRank doesn't care about IPs.
I haven't a clue whether the weighting given to anchor text from outwith a domain also requires the link to be outwith the IP (or class C). It is possible to test rigorously, but I don't know anyone who's done it.
1. Build for your visitors, not the SE's.
2. If it seems too tricky, then it probably is.
Do it for your friends, AdamGuy, and not the search engines and you should be fine.
And just to clarify... I'm certainly not doing this to boost my main site's page rank. To give you an example of my friends' sites... one of them just wants a resume-type site to talk about her theatre lighting business (neither high-traffic nor high-profit to be sure!), another wants to make a general blog about his travels, and so on.
To this day, both my hosting company and the original SEO company still maintain a PR0 ranking. Fortunately, my clients are again showing pagerank to some degree.
I believe they are now cross checking the entire IP address to better control inter-linking, although I'm not certain yet.
Be careful if you're concerned about ranking with google.
care to share what type of interlinking you think triggered this overall penalty?
(no redirects? hidden links? etc?)
I guess the question was just hypothetical, vita!?
>The big question, then, still remains whether Google's PR takes into account underlying IP addresses.
Aagain, one never knows ...
[edited by: Yidaki at 8:26 pm (utc) on Sep. 2, 2003]
Unfortunately, I haven't had much luck getting answers from them in the past (after writing help and webmaster)... and even a Google fella who promised in person to help find out stuff for me and get back to me has not :(
Any suggestions as to how we could get a more definitive answer on this issue?
expat
Only our SEO clients from prior to August 15th were effected, and everyone's pagerank went from PR4 and up, to a gray bar, on the same day.
I am not the high binder type and have always operated each of my companys with integrity. The only possibility for the drop was interlinking of the sites and nothing else.
Any suggestions as to how we could get a more definitive answer on this issue?
A method to prevent people link exclusively to increase pr. As said here, it won't be trouble if you care.
IMO could be useful only if you host 1000 friends at same time (will need good hardware for virtual hosting).
At risk google runs a filter in the future and then all your work goes to trash.
There are many unclear decisions doing optimization like this one I prefer to follow the sure path when I doubt, usually I found another way.
Gus
Google does care and will ban your site if too many backlinks come from the same IP Block. As the owner of a hosting company and a SEO, all my SEO clients were dropped in October, 2002 and did not reappear until July 2003.
I respectfully suggest that you've made an erroneous inference.
People find their PR smashed and their rankings decimated often times simply due to Google's algorithm changes. One of my pages, which was a PR5, can no longer even be found in Google's index. But the rest of my site is fine. For weeks, one of my pages ranked in the top 5 for "Magnificant Foo." Now it doesn't even show in the top 50.
I made no changes to my Magnificant Foo page. But most importantly, I can't assume that my MF rankings and dramatically changed PR of other pages over time is related to anything I did or didn't do.
Google works in mysterious ways. And until someone offers clear evidence that GoogleGuy has frowned upon informal linking of sites virtually hosted on the same server or can point me to similar info from Google, I'll not discourage my friends on my server from adding a thoughtful link to one or more of my sites.
My personal experience is that inter-IP links carry little weight.
I mean, what are the odds that unrelated sites linking to each other would be in the same narrow IP range? ;)
On the other hand, though, I am now having trouble imagining how people could evilly jigger the system. If you're running a link farm, you're trying to get lots of random folks to link to you, and they're not on your server or within your IP range.
Similarly, if Dumb Joe decides to go out and buy domain1.com domain2.com domain3.com and host them all himself and link them together, he's not gonna get any benefit unless he manages to get at least one of the domains with a high PR to begin with... and if he could achieve that singularly for one site, why bother diluting that strength with a bunch of other bogus sites?
If PR didn't "leak," then I could see this sort of multi-domain buying to be a problem. But with it leaking as it does -- maybe I'm naive here -- I don't see loopholes.
Similar content, not linking to each other, on the same IP range:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Google dropped the older, established page with tons on inbound links, and in its place is "similar content page".
The new Google patent speaks of IP ranges and hosts, so it's quite obvious that it is something Google considers.
"Consider" and "employs" are two different things. From what I gather there's no proof that the patent you mention is being used on a consistent basis on live datacenters.
I mean, what are the odds that unrelated sites linking to each other would be in the same narrow IP range? ;)
...how about hosted homepages? Nothing to do with each other but all crammed into the same range as their (and added onto the url of their) ISP host. That perhaps has nothing to do with the sites of most people who come here...
However, what IS being applied, is a cross-link penalty based on percentagese. If your shared links create a "closed loop" of sites, without few other inbound links coming in to the network of sites, you WILL get penalized. Now that I have seen over and over again, and can vouch that it WILL catch you.
If you work the percentages, however, you should be okay. I try to at least go for 3:1. For every site in your "network" that links to you, make sure you have 3 other inbound links that are from sites in different networks. If you work according to this you will be safe and build the link power you need for your site to rank for your keywords (if you have them in the anchor text).
So it's imperative to acquire non-reciprocal links coming into your site.
Remind me not to link to CNN and scripting.com the next time they link to me :D
But seriously, this does raise a red flag in my head! I belong to an informal social network of bloggers via a small business group, and many in the group have created blogrolls that include a list of all their fellow bloggers in the small network. This means that 30-40 people are all linking to everyone else in that group.
So from what I understand, this is a big no-no, right?
Couldn't this be a prob for many unsuspecting sites? I mean, take political campaigns. It can imagine it'd be common for many local sites ("San Franciscans for [so and so]") to list related sites, and if they all list each other, that could spell bad Page Rank, eh? Hmm. Interesting stuff to consider!
