3 replies to this topic

[doogie88]

Say you had 15 different websites, different content, but a similar theme.
Would it be wise to have 15 different hosting accounts so you can have 15 different IPs and link them between each other, or very least link them to one main site?
Hosting is only a couple bucks a month for a small site, so would cost about $30-$45/month.

[piskie]

Matt Cutts once said that sharing IPs had no effect on Googles treatment of the value of links. It would however make any innapropriate linking easier and quicker to detect. The yardstick that he recommended to apply was it's a good thing to link between "Like minded Sites".

[Randy]

And from personal experience since I have the exact type of thing you're talking about...

I link directly between my sites when and where it makes sense to do so. Purely from a visitor perspective. Pretty much all of my e-comm sites link back to the "Corporate" site, because that makes sense for each and every one of 'em. And the "Corporate" site links out to each of my e-comm sites, because this also makes sense from a human perspective. The sites do after all have a relationship.

FWIW, my personal sites and/or sites where it makes no sense don't link this way.

In other words I'm very up front about the fact that all of the sites are part of the same family. Both with visitors and with the search engines. At one time all of them were on the same server, so either had an identical IP number or one in the same Class range. Nowadays I run a few servers so they're spread out across a couple of ranges.

I've never seen any negative effect from doing this with any of the search engines. And because I'm up front about all of it and always have been, when I launch a new e-comm site it tends to get spidered right away and tends to start ranking for its phrases pretty quickly. Because at the very least it gets a link from the "Corporate" site, before I even start a link building campaign.

[doogie88]

Okay, thank you both.