Sites on same server

[max]

How bad is trading links with your own sites on the same hosting account ?

does Google care if two sites are on the same server?

I have searched for it and people seem to have different views about it

[chromate]

There is no clear answer to this. Sites that're heavily interlinked on the same class C IP address could run into problems. Then again, maybe it would be fine.

Personally speaking, why risk it? Hosting accounts are so cheap these days, especially if you have a few sites generating a profit.

I have experienced sites being dropped that were heavily interlinked with other sites on the same class C IP address. Almost as soon as I removed all the links between the sites - they re-appeared in the SERPs. Maybe it was a coincidence. Or maybe not. I don't know.

[Chris]

I don't think you'll find this resulting in a penalty, but it may not help as much as links from sites on different IPs.

[max]

ok I have a hosting account where I can have ad-on domains within the same account
the ad-on domain actually exists as a subdomain in the main hosting account

ex. If I have the hosting account for www.xyz.com and I also want to host a site www.abc.com on the same account than the site www.abc.com will actually exist as http://abc.xyz.com ( howerver it is also accessable via http://www.abc.com )

is this scenario similar to normal "sites are on the same server" thing for SE's or is there any thing different about it ?

[max]

[r2d2]

Yes, they are all on the same IP Max.

[tomek]

I don't think you'll find this resulting in a penalty, but it may not help as much as links from sites on different IPs.

That's what I think too. You won't get a penalty unless you have a link farm but links with your own sites on the same hosting account are not worth very much. Try to get many links from different IPs/Domains.

[dvduval]

Last month I moved a site over to its own hosting account from a server that had about 200 sites on it. It is now getting about 10 as much traffic, and making a killing (in my world) on adsense. I can't be sure this is what caused it to suddenly jump after 14 months of very little traffic, but you can bet I will be doing more experimenting with other sites.

I also wonder if the choice of host makes a difference. For example, what if you host has a bunch of spammy sites on your server/ip block?

[chromate]

Perhaps, if a host has a particularly high number of poor sites. But in general, I doubt it matters what sites share the same hosting.

[Cutter]

Last month I moved a site over to its own hosting account from a server that had about 200 sites on it. It is now getting about 10 as much traffic, and making a killing (in my world) on adsense. I can't be sure this is what caused it to suddenly jump after 14 months of very little traffic, but you can bet I will be doing more experimenting with other sites.

I have a site with a server that went down for 2 days. I transfered the site to a new host and now it only gets 25% of the traffic. I don't know if this is because of the host, or because it went down for 2 days.

From my understanding, if there is a spammer on your virtual host / IP your site can get penalized from Google. (I wish I remember where I read this.) The same is true with opt-in e-mail lists if you use a third party for the mailings (that I read on MarketingSherpa)

[James]

I've never found anyone with evidence suggesting that this is true.

I think it's all just rumors to scare people into purchasing more hosting accounts; Google's smart enough to realize that webmasters can make several quality sites on similar topics that they'd naturally interlink (what's the difference between them doing this, and them having a good friend who has a similar site--which is common--? they've got just as good of a chance of getting the link exchange). They also know that many people are hosted on their friends' servers--yes, even freeloaders can make quality sites and content.

[Nikolas]

It's ok. I have all my sites in the same server (same ip) and I even got pagerank by interlinking them

[r2d2]

PageRank wont be affected by where the links come from, since it is a formula and location of links is not a factor.

Links also affect SE results listing in other ways than just PR (e.g. anchor text), and links from sites on the same server may or may not be less useful than links from different IP ranges.