Penalizing Your Host

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I have roughly 20 sites on a single baby hostgator account. Only about 5 are making me money, another 5 are projects im sitting on. And the other 10 are either worthless or just blank sites.

I was planning on making a decent sized niche site and wondering if there is any chance that google might penalize; or having too many sites on one host might hurt SEO?

I am aware hostgator uses shared hosting, that is shared by many. However, I am sure there is a way G can tell based on either the same registrar for that domain and/or the same websites all coming from the same hostgator account.

Is there a reason for me to be concerned and get another hostgator account under a different name?
#search engine optimization #host #penalizing
  • Many sites share servers and rank well. As long as you are not linking them together you should be fine. If you are linking them, shared IPs is a huge red flag and will probably cause penalties.
    • [1] reply
    • Yea they share servers but they're all different people. When 20-30 domains are coming from the same cpanel account -- that is what I'm worried about.

      Each cpanel account has an email, that google can see. Thats one way they could tell that those 30 domains are all residing on the same email via the same cpanel account via the same shared host.
      • [1] reply
  • It really depends, and here's why I say that. I have a network I've built with about ~100 or so sites. All of which haven't been used in over a year. I'm testing the aging process of this network. One very small set of sites recently lost it's pagerank and the only common factor was the host. It was a smaller shared host and when I did an IP lookup it seems someone else was using the host for their network (and got caught) and thus my sites were collateral damage.

    So if Google looks into the IP for some reason they could deindex/devalue the sites.
  • It's safe to say that Google has all kinds of ways to sniff out any number of footprints you may be leaving. Except for the most obvious ones, it's hard to say which of your many possible footprints Google will penalize. Certainly, cross-linking your domains is an obvious no-no.

    If you're going to invest time and energy into a "decent sized niche site", why not simply move the site to a different, inexpensive host? Problem solved. Hosting is so cheap these days, there's no good reason to risk it.

    Good luck!
  • I don't think they could penalize you for anything too many sites, but it's possible your host may not allow it.
  • I'm sure it won't affect it too much. I've had a lot of sites on one package before and nothing has happened to them.
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    Penalizing Your Host

    I have roughly 20 sites on a single baby hostgator account. Only about 5 are making me money, another 5 are projects im sitting on. And the other 10 are either worthless or just blank sites. I was planning on making a decent sized niche site and wondering if there is any chance that google might penalize; or having too many sites on one host might hurt SEO?