Same category websites on same IP - Later changed

[anzsub30]

Hi,
(Kindly direct me to right link if the answer is already given, as I could not find it)
I have two websites (A & B) that fall in the same category. The content on both sites is different. However, I realized that Google is rewarding only website B and in spite of adding more content on site A, it does not pick up. Rather, its SERPs are down with time, however, site A is rewarded and growing.
Then I learned on Twitter (a discussion between John Muller and others) that Google may choose to reward only one website if multiple sites fall on the same category on the same IP.
So, I transferred website A on the new host with different IP and relatively fast hosting. The content is the same as on the previous host.
The question is: Will Google take this change and start to consider site A at its own (totally independent of site B). Do I need to make any other changes to remove that "Tag" e.g. Whois info or any other thing? And how long it should take?
After three months, I saw no change in traffic, though there is no significant Google update happened or reported here.

[csdude55]

From my experience, no, having it on a separate server will not have an impact. I have 50+ sites like this (similar but different content), and Google just doesn't like that.

The best solution I can offer is to set this in the header on any page with duplicate content:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.MAINSITE.com/PAGE/">

(in this example, MAINSITE and PAGE are placeholders for the actual names)

This way, Google will send all of the traffic to the main site, and no more penalty.

[anzsub30]

Thanks for the reply!

That's a bad news.
How Google knows all these 50sites belongs to the same owner (if those are content/information sites). If on separate servers and still Google knows then they use some other means other than IP address as well?

[NickMNS]

How Google knows all these 50 sites belongs to the same owner (if those are content/information sites).

Google doesn't care who owns what. For a given keyword, Google will choose one site out of the 50 and show that one. If all signals and content are identical then the site will be chosen at random. If there are some more favorable signals then the more favorable site will be chosen.