How Many Sites Are Too Many?

Google could care less if you owned a million sites.
How could they keep track? Why would they keep track?
You can register sites in your name, your wife's name, your
host's name, even make it private. So, with so many ways
to make the info not worth a hill of beans, why would google
waste time keeping track?

If you have an adsense account, and post ads on all those sites,
yes indeed, now they have a way of keeping track.

You know you have reached the breaking point if you cannot
give the full attention to your websites that need it. For me,
that's 6, but 2 are regularly neglected.

You should spread your hosting around. Not for keeping it secret
or any mythical advantage, but because hosts get the axe for
some reasons. I have yet, however, to hear of any reputable host
taking a hit from google. But there are people like me. We like
smaller, local, more personal hosts. Those are probably more prone
to certain "things."

I'm not sure at what number that people would say to diversify hosting.
I can't even guess. 14 sounds like a smallish number to me.

People get de-indexed for doing bad things. Don't do bad things, you
have nothing to worry about. Except that hosting caution above.

Paul

I've had over 50+ on the same shared hosting account and they still rank/make money so no problem with that.

I think you should more concerned about the whims of Google's algo changes.

I too have had over 90 sites on the one account, and this wasn't a problem.

I've never had a site banned or sandboxed by Google.

You should be fine with 15+.

15 is definitely a low number, you have a long time to worry about quantity

Had the same question and I'm glad I found the answer here. THanks guys

Too many? It depends on what you want to achieve, your structure, your budget, etc etc etc.

Imagine you want to create one small private network, you'll need at least a couple hundred sites and at least 30-50 different hosting plans or a good SEO hosting.

It's all about your goals really.

They will know they are all your sites if you put your Adsense code on them, or you register them all with Google Webmasters Tools. Hope this helps.

If they decide something is seriously wrong with how you handle one site, especially if you are involved with AdWords or AdSense, or track everything in Google Analytics in one account, then they can find all the rest of the sites.

Again, not a problem unless they are planning on sending a serious message to you that something very bad is going on. Then they kill them all so you get the point.

A second point nobody has mentioned is competitor tracking. If you use the same WHOIS information on all the sites, and then somebody tracks them back to the same IP, they might be able to find a pattern in your sites to reverse-engineer and steal your ideas. I think it's a bit paranoid to worry about this, especially at your level, but have heard of some folks who swear by diversifying their hosting for this reason.

And if you're linking around between sites, backlinks need IP diversification to get a good profile. Probably a minor issue as I doubt you're building mini-nets at this quantity level.

The only other issue is resources and catastrophe. If the server all those sites are hosted on dies, and the backups fail or you don't have them, there goes the whole business. If an account is hacked, they're all vulnerable. With some accounts, you have storage space, bandwidth, or other limitations. You might run up against a wall there. Or, being on shared hosting can slow down bandwidth/resource intensive sites.

But, like others have said, you're a long way from an issue with the resources. Just make sure you've got regular off-server backups.

As long as you're following the rules, have safeguarded your data from loss, are not running web-based services that are bandwidth-intensive, and aren't tapping out hosting resources, you should be fine for quite a while.