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Seeking opinions again - I have about 16 sites on a server, one site is the main site, and the other 15 are essentially product sites <snip> -- one for each community. The link setup is essentially thus - the main site links to each of the product sites and the product sites all link back. The product sites however, don't link to each other. These are geographically relevant sites. I was thinking of putting the main on a separate IP.
Also there are a four sites that compete because they are in the same states. What about getting two more ips for those as well so they arent sharing IPs?
Thanks,
Ward
[edited by: caveman at 1:10 am (utc) on May 12, 2008]
[edit reason] Remove specifics, per TOS [/edit]
We over a dozen sites on the same IP and have always done things that way for many years. I assume that if we were going to be penalized for it, it would have happened by now.
Yes, having multiple sites on the same IP may be a very small factor in the overall scheme of things. But if that's the case, you would most likely get a better return on your time/energy/money by focusing on other issuers.
I look at it this way: if you feel you need to have different IPs to try to hide things from Google (or other SEs), they're probably going to figure it out sooner or later anyway. If you don't feel you need to hide anything, then you shouldn't have anything to worry about.
But like everything else Internet-based, your mileage may vary and there are probably dozens of other people with a different experience/opinion.
In one way of thinking though a weed is just a plant you don't want and a penalty can just be a quality score indicator you didn't take advantage of though, is my thinking. In other words, how would I ever know if can score better if I have never tried it.
I don't really think of it as hiding things but avoiding triggering parts of the algorithm that are not sophisticated enough to give the me the score I deserve lol. I have had to fight a lot of duplicate content issues that shouldn't matter because my sites are geographically relevant and not nationally relevant. There shouldn't be comparison going on imo.
My situation sounds a little like yours, we have 15 or so sites on the same ip for years. Solving our duplicate content issues, 301'ing, canonicaly determining our main tld's, rewriting to a more semantic code structure etc... has helped us. In that recent PR update our main went from four to five and all our sub sites went from 2's and 3's to 4's. I just keep looking for that next edge. I figure my competition is not going to rest either.
Thanks,
W
