Different Hosting Accounts for Linking?
-
I have several different sites which link to each other (for valid reasons...sister companies etc). Would it be better if these were hosted from different web hosting firms? And if they are hosted by the same hosting company would it be better if they had different accounts and different IP addresses?
Not sure I understand C blocks etc. Any tutorial on here about that?
I wouls assume it would look better to Google if the links were not from the same IP address.
Thanks.
-
I fully agree about the links warpath. My point is that in my opinion you are at far greater risk from trying to hide the nature of the interconnected sites with machinations on hosting, IP addresses etc, than to simply legitimately link them.
Any attempt to artificially pass significant ranking influence between these related sites is bound to be caught by Google eventually because there are just too many signals available for Google to spot.
While I'm unwilling to say "never" where Google's algorithm is concerned, I would say a legitimate, natural interlinking between these sites is BY FAR the safest approach, compared to the alternatives. The only safer way would be not to interlink at all.
I do feel your pain. Google is playing with people's livelihoods with these inaccurately applied penalties, whether algorithmic or manual.
Paul
-
Paul,
I appreciate your input and agree with your sentiment. However, as we know, Google is on the warpath regarding links. We are dealing with an algorithm that is applied very broadly. My fear is that perfectly innocent and resonable links between companies gets caught in a new tweak by Google.
I have seen many "good" quality sites get hurt by Panda and Penguin. Sometimes the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. I've seen it enough times. Google is not perfect. If I can try and protect a site from potential harm then I would do it. The cost of multiple hosting accounts pales in comparison the getting penalized by the big G.
-
In my experience, Ebtec, worrying about this kind of thing is a waste of time. These are exactly the kinds of attempted manipulations that have gotten so many sites into trouble in the recent past as search engines clamp down.
The question you'd need to ask yourself, is (and I mean no disrespect) "am I smarter than Google's engineers?" Because the only reason to try to run these sites from different address to appear unconnected is to try to fool Google into passing more ranking value between them. And that's manipulation in Google's eyes,so they're gonna want to catch you and penalize you for it.
The reality to this is that you'd not only have to run the sites from different hosts and totally unrelated IP addresses, you'd also need to have totally separate Google Analytics accounts registered with totally unrelated email addresses. And totally unrelated domain registrations. And unrelated Adwords/Adsense accounts. Plus any other "fingerprinting" techniques Google might be using now or come up with in the future.
There's no harm in linking between these sites legitimately to show they are "sister sites". But trying to fake Google into treating them as totally unrelated is a fool's errand in my opinion. Use the time & money you would have to invest in all that extra hosting and multiple accounts, and instead work up some really useful content for your users and spend some time getting others to help promote it through social sharing etc. It'll end up bringing way more long-term value than trying to trick Google for a little while. (Not to mention way less dangerous if were to get caught!)
Does that help?
Paul
-
How many links are you talking about? I think that if you naturally link your sister companies sites in your company sites... you don't have to worry about having a separate hosting. Google wont go after you if have a few links from the same ip.
Now if you have 40 sites all linking for your main site. Google might see that as manipulation so you can try to hide that you own all the sites. however the host is only thing, they can also check for who owns the domain etc...
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is Link equity / Link Juice lost to a blocked URL in the same way that it is lost to nofollow link
Hi If there is a link on a page that goes to a URL that is blocked in robots txt - is the link juice lost in the same way as when you add nofollow to a link on a page. Any help would be most appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew-SEO0 -
New link explorer
I was checking this new tool which is really cool by the way and was wondering if I can outrank big guys with just content. I have a Domain authority of 28 with a spam score of 28 % Can I outrank with amazing content a site that hase a domain authority of 50 and a spam score of 1 % ? Should I ask for all my bad links to be removed so that my spam score goes down or doesn't it matter anymore those days and what matters is good content, link just don't count anymore ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Links: Links come from bizzare pages
Hi all, My question is related to links that I saw in Google Search Console. While looking at who is linking to my site, I saw that GSC has some links that are coming from third party websites but these third party webpages are not indexed and not even put up by their owners. It looks like the owner never created these pages, these pages are not indexed (when you do a site: search in Google) but the URL of these pages loads content in the browser. Example - www.samplesite1.com/fakefolder/fakeurl what exactly is this thing? To mention more details, the third party website in question is a Wordpress website and I guess is probably hijacked. But how does one even get these types pages/URLs up and running on someone else's website and then link out to other websites. I am concerned as the content that I am getting link from is adult content and I will have to do some link cleansing soon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
Is it safe to link my websites together?
Hi Everyone, I have 10 websites which are all of good standing and related. My visitors would benefit of knowing about the other websites but I don't want to trigger a google penalty by linking them all together. Ideally I'd also like to pass on importance through the links as well. How would you proceed in this situation? Advice would be greatly appreciated, Peter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoyalBlueCoffee0 -
If linking to contextual sites is beneficial for SE rankings, what impact does the re=“nofollow” attribute have when applied to these outbound contextual links?
Communities, opinion-formers, even Google representatives, seem to offer a consensus that linking to quality, relevant sites is good practice and therefore beneficial for SEO. Does this still apply when the outbound links are "nofollow"? Is there any good research on this out there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielpressley0 -
Internal links and URL shortners
Hi guys, what are your thoughts using bit.ly links as internal links on blog posts of a website? Some posts have 4/5 bit.ly links going to other pages of our website (noindexed pages). I have nofollowed them so no seo value is lost, also the links are going to noindexed pages so no need to pass seo value directly. However what are your thoughts on how Google will see internal links which have essential become re-direct links? They are bit.ly links going to result pages basically. Am I also to assume the tracking for internal links would also be better using google analytics functionality? is bit.ly accurate for tracking clicks? Any advice much appreciated, I just wanted to double check this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Disadvantages of linking to uncompressed images?
Images are compressed and resized to fit into an article, but each image in the article links to the original file - which in some cases is around 5Mb. The large versions of the images are indexed in Google. Does this decrease the website's crawl budget due to the time spent downloading the large files? Does link equity disappear through the image links? Either way I don't think it's a very good user experience if people click on the article images to see the large images - there's no reason for the images to be so large. Any other thoughts? Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Link to domain
Let's say i want to rank for rental car service and purchases a domain rental-car-service and creates a site http://www.rental-car-service.com There will be few persons who won't use anchor text to link to the site, but will simply link using URL ( in this case http://www.rental-car-service.com ) So, will a link to http://www.rental-car-service.com from another site using http://www.rental-car-service.com as anchor text help the keyword rental car service ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050