Multiple sites on one host?

[pabawn]

an earlier thread I saw someone state that I my sites, if all hosted on the same server (same ip address) but with different domain names via apache vhosts... these sites may be getting docked in google and other SE for being on the same host?

whats up with that? and is it even true..

if it is, that's awful because http protocol requires a host: field in order for browsers to tell a server what site they want to see. the google spider sends the host: when it connects....

[awall19]

hi pabawn
welcome to the forums
it is not having a bunch of sites on the same host IP that hurts you. in fact Google's domain penalties are usually applied by domain name and not IP address.

I think in some rare occassions they may apply the penalties in other ways. (I think I was told a bunch of the SearchKing hosted sites were being penalized)

the problem which arises with a bunch of domains from the same IP address is if you start interlinking a bunch of domains and have few inbound links into that cluster it can look suspicios

[John Scott]

Which thread are you referring to? A link here might be useful.

[pabawn]

ah ok, i have bawnweb.com which is a web design / hosting site that i'm working on. some of my customers are linking to my page, and some of the other sites I own are also linking to it. I also link to those sites because I host them and I want people to see that. I have an inbound link or two from some of Kyle (theSpear)'s pages into this "cluster" of sites...

I was just kind of wondering how interlinking them will affect them, after all they are all related because I am the webmaster of them. I want people to look at the other sites I built.

*edit* these sites are not all related... and they're coming up in google's related: search due to the linkages... :/ but all my sites have PR5 */edit*

[awall19]

you can do a decent amount of interlinking without it hurting you. a half dozen or dozen sites probably doesn't get you in trouble, but if you start getting into like hundreds of sites all linking back and forth then that is a different thing.

it also is not that bad if you are a hub and all the links point to your site as long as there is some other good link popularty comming from many sites external to that network. what really gets people in trouble is when they start interlinking 50 sites to all other 50 and stuff like that.

[awall19]

if you designed them all then they all are related to your web design site.

[I, Brian]

Google has two algorithms up its sleeve - LocalRank and Hilltop - that expressly devalue links from within the same C block.

To what extent any such penalty may actually be applied at any moment could be hard to fathom - but for SEO purposes it's best to have the sites on different servers when interlinking.

[pabawn]

well that's lame -- what the heck? these sites each have some good content on them.. although i must admit i need to work on more pages for each site :/