Linked sites on different IP ranges

Is it worth doing?

[surfgatinho]

I have a network of regional sites that do pretty well. There are about 5 or 6 of them and they are currently spread around 3 different servers.

The original reason was to give a bit of extra beef to the links with them being on different IP networks.
However, now it'd be a lot easier if they were on the same or a pair of hosted servers I have for sharing data and being on the same platform etc.

Do you think it's still worth keeping them on different servers or can we assume Google et al know exactly who owns them and any benefit is mitigated?

Thanks,
Chris

[petra]

Google became a domain registrar for a reason, you can bet they know who owns the sites.

Besides any benefit mitigated, you're taking a risk of a potential Google penalty.

My advice, stick with legit link building tactics and stay away from cross-linking your sites.

[surfgatinho]

Thanks Petra.
All the links are fairly legit and spread around the sites pretty sparingly.

I'm thinking I'll probably move the sites onto the same server and share some backend resources

[BradleyT]

As long as they aren't garbage sites don't worry about interlinking and hosting on the same IP. Any sort of penalty for this would be silly because it implies that a person cannot create more than 1 "good" website.

Also just be sure that these links don't make up a majority of your backlink profile.

Edit to add - I interlink sites on the same dedicated server.

[edited by: BradleyT at 5:22 pm (utc) on Mar. 26, 2009]

[JS_Harris]

I just worked with a client who owns 5 sites all on the same shared host, in the same hosting plan, and the internal link/backlink profile in his WMT account looks great.

He didn't use any sitewide crosslinks and he did a good job of only linking when the link would provide value. I can confirm that many of the links carry weight.

Like BradleyT said, don't let them make up the majority of your backlink profile and don't spam them everywhere and the occasional link is fine regardless of how your site is hosted.