Linking Between Multiple Client Sites, Can search engines detect remote database connection Options

[Helter Skelter D...]

I have not recommended this approach (IMG:style_emoticons/default/angel_not.gif) ... but my client hopes to get inbound link value by linking between a number of their own sites and for this reason has asked me to arrange hosting so that each site has a different c-class ip address. For the sake of efficiency I wish to manage the content/meta tags etc., centrally using connection to a remote (i.e. central) database on each of the sites. Is there anyway that this could neutralize the effort of getting the different c-class ip addresses?

David

[Randy]

I'm not sure which question you're asking David. If you want to know if the database connection is going to alert the search engines to a deeper connection between the sites, No that's not going to happen. The database connection should b taking place at a level that is completely transparent to users and search engine spiders.

I'll caution you however that you'd better have some pretty high level control over the server that the database sits on however. There is a security risk to opening up the database port to the world. I don't know how other hosts do it, but as a general rule my own servers would not allow such a setup. I block external database connections at the firewall because it's an easy security measure that thwarts a lot of attacks. The only servers where I allow an external db connection is when a server is set up to only house databases in order to offload some load to a different CPU. And even then I only allow certain IP numbers (that of the site's main server) to connect.

If you're asking the other obvious question, whether having sites owned by the same person/company on several different servers and interlinking them will help, the answer is it may help for a little bit but probably won't forever. The engines have gotten very good at looking at linking relationships and picking up on this type of thing. So it's a lot of work and a decent amount of extra expense that in the end won't be a huge advantage.

[Helter Skelter D...]

You have correctly guessed my question. Thanks for your answer

I absolutely take your point about the limited, and perhaps short term, value of building sites and linking between them in this way ... in fact I have advised my client instead to put the effort into negotiating inbound links from existing independant sites ... but they are determined to experiment with this!

David