Google Penalty For Multiple Sites On Same IP Address?

[dannycapri]

Hi all,

If someone had 100 websites (each with rich, unique content, and not interlinked) on the same shared hosting, with the same IP address, same WhoIs info., and built using same website template; I have heard of cases where Google may penalize all these sites by de-indexing them (as they may leave a footprint, which Google detects).

Is this true?

Is the best solution to use different hosting for each site?

Thanks in advance.

[cagliostro]

Not true. If totally different content and no heavy interlinking between them.

In two words, if you are honest with Google you have no worries.

[simpleonline1234]

Not true at all. You can have one million sites all from the same IP and Google doesn't see that as any type of spam. Now if you tried linking them together then it may raise flags but not always.

[dannycapri]

Thanks for your replies.

Maybe I'm worrying unnecessarily that having multiple sites on the same IP address would affect SERP's.

[Scott Rankin]

I'll go a step further and prove it isn't true. Do you really think when you sign-up for $5/month hosting they are supplying you with a unique IP address just for your one website? Of course not.

When I used to have an account like that with Host Gator, there were nearly 50,000 domains going to that same IP address. Google is not going to be banning all 50,000 of those domains, I guarantee it. Don't worry about this, you'll be fine.

[GeorgR.]

NO,

although i read that it is ONE of the minor ranking factors (amongst 200+/- other ranking factors), means it has a little weight what other sites are on that IP, but probably very, very, very insignificant.

[Black Hat Cat]

Originally Posted by dannycapri

Hi all,

If someone had 100 websites (each with rich, unique content, and not interlinked) on the same shared hosting, with the same IP address, same WhoIs info., and built using same website template; I have heard of cases where Google may penalize all these sites by de-indexing them (as they may leave a footprint, which Google detects).

Is this true?

Is the best solution to use different hosting for each site?

Thanks in advance.

Stop and think about it for a minute....why would Google penalize you for this? You've given them what they want...sites with rich, unique content. And footprints are only an issue if you're doing something you shouldn't be doing. Dreamweaver leaves footprints. Google isn't going to ban you for using Dreamweaver.

[kevinflatt]

It might be a good idea not to use the same template for all 100 sites though. Just a thought.

[Marakatapolis]

What WILL get you Google slapped while on a shared hosting account, is heavily cross-linking your websites together.

[searchnology]

It's not a problem as long as:

1. The sites aren't duplicates
2. The sites aren't spam sites with poor content

Backlinking all of your sites to a central money site won't provide as much benefit (unclear to what extent) from a link juice perspective however.

[mrdeflation]

100% not true.. I have a bunch of different unique content websites that are on the same IP/hosting and they rank very well for certain keywords I target.

[Mike Anthony]

Agreed. The only time you have something to worry about is when you start linking them together. Now if you are or were doing something spammy with one domain then that also may reflect on the other sites on the same IP etc.

[tomo]

What would happen if you had Google adsence ads on say 50 sites on one ip address, Google would be able to link all your sites together through the ads. Would they penalize you that way or even ban you adsence account.?
Regards,

Tomo

[louisgeorges]

What if you do want to heavily interlink all those blogs?

Is the only way to do this is to sign up with several different hosting services and make sure no blog links to other blogs on the same hosting account?

I know it will get expensive fast but if it works then great... or is there a better less complicated way?

Thanks,
Louis

[kulonuwun]

Just make sure those websites don't have any heavy interlink to each others. If those websites look like selling spam link then they will penalized.

[communityn]

As long as you are not spamming (auto blogs/other forms of spam), you should be fine.

[derekwong28]

Originally Posted by dannycapri

Hi all,
I have heard of cases where Google may penalize all these sites by de-indexing them (as they may leave a footprint, which Google detects).

This has happened to me before but my sites were not clean. I have played around with turnkey, MFA, scrapper sites etc.

What I think is that for whatever reason, a particular site had been singled out for manual review. Once the reviewer decides to ban the site, he then goes through other sites on that single ip or Class C ips.

What you need to ask yourself is that are you absolutely sure that all your sites are clean? You have to remember that it is not you but Google who makes the decision and their criteria may be different from yours. In my experience, it is very difficult for a person with over 100 sites to keep all sites clean unless he outsources a lot or have employees working for you.

If you have two different sites targetting similar search terms, it would be a good idea to host them under different hosting accounts anyway because it may interfere with the search results.

Besides, it is always a good idea not to keep all your eggs in one basket with a single hosting account. Certainly, my business would be totally dead by now if I were still using 2 or 3 dedicated servers for my sites.

Derek

[paulgl]

Google does not care if you have even 200+ sites on the same server.
Interlink them if they are valuable.
It's what you do to the sites that matters.
The penalty is the same whether it is 1, 2, or 100's.

Paul

[JohnMcCabe]

Summing up what others have said, it isn't the footprint that offends the Google gods. It's what that footprint represents.

In the heyday of the MFA scraper site, Google could examine those sites for common characteristics - certain tags, phrases, script references, etc. When they found those characteristics on undesirable sites, but not on more desirable ones, they could do the digital equivalent of "racial profiling". If your site shared characteristics with sites Google wanted to eliminate, you were gone.

I've been hosting multiple sites on the same account for over ten years now, and I've never been de-indexed because of it.

I've interlinked the sites (sparingly) when the reference was both specific and relative, i.e. linking to an article explaining a technical term rather than reproducing the definition every time I used the term in another article. Never had a problem.

Play nice and give Google users the experience Google wants them to have, and you can put the whole net on one IP and they won't care.

[PhilipSEO]

You have got a lot of good responses, I'll just say based on personal mileage that lots of sites on the same IP is just fine so long as you don't use them for SEO interlining (which would indeed be a bad idea).

[FiverrGuru]

most of the time all your 100 website won't end up on 1 ip address, only a fraction.

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by FiverrGuru

most of the time all your 100 website won't end up on 1 ip address, only a fraction.

Well that's a good point for large hosts. They may assign some to the same, same
to others.

I gave an example of a huge website that has 200+ sites interlinked and ranks
#1 for: yourstate gas prices
They own and interlink all 200+
As stated, they all rank #1 for that phrase, including links in the result!
And YES....they all have adsense!!!!!!!!!!!!
Can we kill this myth once and for all?
texasgasprices.com is an example!
And the big kicker? They are all owned by the company that runs
gasbuddy.com for even more interlinked sites!
Don't believe it? Go to:
Reverse IP Lookup - Find Other Web Sites Hosted on a Web Server
type in texasgasprices.com
Google LOVES those sites!

Paul

[redrossero]

So you want to say that you can interlink you sites on the same ip? I thought this is a no-no.

[derekwong28]

Put it another way, Google prefers inbound links that are naturally acquired i.e. a vote given to your site by other websites. Therefore logically speaking, a site on an another server with a differentip is more likely to belong to another person rather than a site on the same server with the same ip.

As far as I know, there is no penalty for interlinking your own sites on the same ip. However, you may get into trouble if you interlink your sites from other Class C ips if Google finds out. Because with the latter, you are definitely trying to manipulate the results.

The fact that a heavily interlinked site does well on a single ip does not mean that it won't do better if the links came from other ips.

Derek

[JohnMcCabe]

Originally Posted by redrossero

So you want to say that you can interlink you sites on the same ip? I thought this is a no-no.

Like many other tactics, much depends on the reason for interlinking.

If you link to another of your sites on the same or a different IP for the purpose of enhancing the user experience, you're cool.

If you interlink, and especially if you interlink promiscuously, for the express purpose of manipulating your search rankings, you're not cool.

[Daedric]

If none of the 100 sites are doing anything wrong, you shouldn't get any of them de-indexed. If you are doing black hat stuff, if all of them got de-indexed, it's not because of shared hosting as most shared hosting accounts have a lot of other domains owned by other owners. It's mostly likely because of the same template and same WhoIs. If they are all legit, you have nothing to worry about as a lot of webmasters have over a few hundred websites.

[ecsnetwork]

Hi,

I am new on here and wondered if anyone can offer any advice, I have a network of 200 sites marketing different counties of the same subject (each site is targeted towards the unique county, so 200 counties are being marketed) mixed between 2 different templates and each site has 30% fresh content for each area, they are all interlinked together, and from reading the posts if a network of sites are interlinked it is a big NO NO. The network of 200 sites are spilt up between 4-5 different owners, and 30 different IP addresses, across 2 dedicated servers.

Also does it matter if all the sites are within the same google web masters account or should I spilt these up?

Any advice would be appreciated

Thanks

[zk5182]

Be clean and Google won't bother you

[wiganwebs]

Hi, sorry for bumping this but its the closest topic I can find.

I have a client who wants about 30-40 websites built, each about 6-7 pages of unique content, built into profile sites for different aspects of his business.

All websites will be built using Wordpress (or similar), keyword domains, and he wants them interlinking and also pointing to his main site.

I am concerned about this, the guy spends a lot of money on marketing practices and SEO. My first concern was the fact that I am on a dedicated server with same IP address. I run a search in Google and came across this topic so thought I would ask the experts here.

PaulGL, I understand where you are coming from, but those are massive websites and I wonder if Google leaves them alone due to the sheer size of them, but what would the effects be if it was a small network of about 30-40 websites with 6-7 pages each, all interlinked, same/similar topic (different content), linking to main site from homepage?

Basically these minisites are around his main industry, then breaking them down into smaller niche categories to help customers who want to view just one part of his business and not all of it.

I also appreciate that this topic is just over 1 year old and things have moved on since then, but still I need to express my concerns and I dont want to have to go out and spread his websites over different hosts.

Also, is it wise to build them all in wordpress or should I use different CMS, like 5 Wordpress, 5 Joomla, 5 Drupal, etc?

Thank you
WW

[dburk]

Originally Posted by wiganwebs

Hi, sorry for bumping this but its the closest topic I can find.

I have a client who wants about 30-40 websites built, each about 6-7 pages of unique content, built into profile sites for different aspects of his business.

All websites will be built using Wordpress (or similar), keyword domains, and he wants them interlinking and also pointing to his main site.

I am concerned about this, the guy spends a lot of money on marketing practices and SEO. My first concern was the fact that I am on a dedicated server with same IP address. I run a search in Google and came across this topic so thought I would ask the experts here.

PaulGL, I understand where you are coming from, but those are massive websites and I wonder if Google leaves them alone due to the sheer size of them, but what would the effects be if it was a small network of about 30-40 websites with 6-7 pages each, all interlinked, same/similar topic (different content), linking to main site from homepage?

Basically these minisites are around his main industry, then breaking them down into smaller niche categories to help customers who want to view just one part of his business and not all of it.

I also appreciate that this topic is just over 1 year old and things have moved on since then, but still I need to express my concerns and I dont want to have to go out and spread his websites over different hosts.

Also, is it wise to build them all in wordpress or should I use different CMS, like 5 Wordpress, 5 Joomla, 5 Drupal, etc?

Thank you
WW

Hi WW,

From what you described I see no problem.

That stuff about linking sites on the same IP being bad is just a bunch of hooey made up by unscrupulous hosting companies that want to sell you a grossly overpriced hosting package.

If you interlink websites Google will know they are interlinked regardless of whether they are on the same IP or not. Google has no problem with you linking to other pages on the same site, different sites, same domain, different domains, same IP, different IPs as long as what you are doing makes since for users.

[commoditytrainer]

Google does state anywhere about shared hosting for websites and wouldn't penalize your site. On the other hand, I have found through my own experience, if you run a site on a dedicate server, it gets better results for some reason.

[MTLSEO]

Originally Posted by commoditytrainer

Google does state anywhere about shared hosting for websites and wouldn't penalize your site. On the other hand, I have found through my own experience, if you run a site on a dedicate server, it gets better results for some reason.

Yes dedicated servers is much better..

[BarryWheeler]

There's no problem with this.

It's a myth. PaulG gives the best description above with his example.

[ashokseo]

Originally Posted by dannycapri

Hi all,

If someone had 100 websites (each with rich, unique content, and not interlinked) on the same shared hosting, with the same IP address, same WhoIs info., and built using same website template; I have heard of cases where Google may penalize all these sites by de-indexing them (as they may leave a footprint, which Google detects).

Is this true?

Is the best solution to use different hosting for each site?

Thanks in advance.

I don't think so. You won't be penalize unless you have duplicate content or link spamming among those sites

[aymen99]

there is no such thing ! if thats true google would ban their own sites (blogspot sites) as the sites aren't on different ips all of them

[BarryWheeler]

Again, this is a myth.

I run a web hosting company, offer shared hosting for customers who run Blogs for adsense etc. I have my own dedicated server with many of my own sites sitting on it, same IP address and nothing happening from search / adsense etc indicates there's anything wrong with it.

Again, PaulG nailed it in his explanation. Read his comments above.