I have a hosting account and have been planning on running a couple sites under it.. It includes a dedicated IP, and I had the idea of just parking or pointing my domains to a subfolder of the account so I could run a couple sites under the same account.

Based on what I've seen, I get the impression this will not hurt SEO, but just wanted some confirmation from some others who are more experienced than I on this subject.

Any help is kindly appreciated.

EDIT: Just saw a similar post a bit under this one regarding a dedicated IP.. So I guess the consensus is that it doesn't matter too much?

No, it will not hurt SEO.

Hello,

You are correct. This is just a myth, best of luck :)

Thanks for the quick replies Jeff, Zafar!

It will not work, as far as you don't link the site between them :)

Addition:

You don't use it to manipulate your rankings.. It will do fine...Interlinking between your two sites may do harm...

Welll....yessssss....... but then excessive interlinking between any two sites is not going to go unnoticed.

Hello,

You are correct. This is just a myth, best of luck :)

Not a very accurate response for a self proclaimed guru. No it is not a myth, hosting on the same ip can infact put your SEO work in danger if you interlink your sites.

I guess the truth of SEO Noob does not stroke the ego the same as pretending to be a guru does.

obviously the best practice is to use a single IP per website. as we all know though, its not always possible with the number of available IP addresses shrinking every day.
this is not really a yes or no answer, but rather a sometimes. links between a few sites on a server with only a few sites will get noticed by the search bots. on the other hand, if you have 1000 sites on one ip and a handfull have the same link it will not hurt you.
with many clients in related industries, we do have a lot of interlinking but using the proper techniques for linking we have not seen any adverse results.

Hello mr_dimsum,

Could you be more clear?

Hosting multiple domains under your same account has multiple meanings.

1. Addon Domains - This is a subdomain under your main domain but you can access it with a Qualified Domain Eg: www.YourSite.com it is actually www.YourSite.Maindomain.com

The above will surely affect your SE Rankings.

2. Hosting domains separately as each accounts will not affect your site in anyway.

Please elucidate inway just how will that impact on your search engine rankings??

Let us go practically. One of my domain is mywebcopywriter.com, it is hosted as an addon domain, I have tested it months ago it is still not crawled by Google.

I have to do SEO things to get crawled by Google. I have tested it before in other domains as well.

I really don't think that being an addon domain has anything to do with your site not being crawled by Googlebot.

Your server header that is returned to bots is:

Requested: 2008/04/14 23:54:31
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 6.0)
Server Headers Details

1. REQUESTING: http://mywebcopywriter.comHEAD / HTTP/1.1 Connection: Keep-AliveHOST: mywebcopywriter.comUser-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 6.0)Accept: */* SERVER RESPONSE: 200 OKDate: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:54:29 GMTServer: ApacheLast-Modified: Wed, 26 Dec 2007 08:51:53 GMTETag: "83c013-df2-47721629"Accept-Ranges: bytesContent-Length: 3570Connection: closeContent-Type: text/html

IMO its much more likely that the lack of indexing of your pages is due to the fact that neither Google, Yahoo or MSN report a single link pointing at your site.

Google will index your domain automatically within a week as soon as registered. I have registered two domains on the same date of the above domain. Made it as an addon and the other in a main account. The other domain has no content and it has been indexed by Google within a week, but not the above domain.

This is not only one test that I have made, there are several tests. I had a web directory as an addon and I welcomed Google with Robots.txt although I was constructing my Web directory. Google never cared the addon domain for more that one and half months(I had about 5 page contents), then I submitted the site manually to Google SE. Got crawled, after completing the website, I had launched it as a unique domain. No issues for now.

I make tests and experiments like this frequently. Cant reveal everything though!

duhhhhh..... well first of all lets look at the obvious and ignore your idea that all domains are indexed as soon as they are registered.

Google states that they will not index a domain unless they cannot find at least one link pointing to it and that is sufficient reason for your site not to be indexed, you don't have to look any further, Now you can make me look like a fool by showing us that the other domain was indeed indexed at the same time and that it does not have any links at all pointing to it, but I am willing to take my chances.

Please do not skip my statements. Original statements is not as soon as you have registered.
Original Statments:
"Google will index your domain automatically within a week as soon as registered"
Google states that they will not index a domain unless they cannot find at least one link pointing to it and that is sufficient reason for your site not to be indexed

Where does Google Say that?

Google:"We add and update new sites to our index each time we crawl the web"

Unless there is a speck on my specs I can't find the part that says we index all new sites each time we crawl the web??

Yes indeed they do add new sites to the web, but you yourself have said that one of your domains is not indexed ??

Unless there is a speck on my specs I can't find the part that says we index all new sites each time we crawl the web??

Yes indeed they do add new sites to the web, but you yourself have said that one of your domains is not indexed ??

I have already said that it was an addon domain. Again even Google cannot guarantee or predict that it will index all new domains.

Google:"We add and update new sites to our index each time we crawl the web"

If they add 1 site each crawl, they have done what they said. I do not like saying "each crawl" though as it is really just one continuous.

Google Says so!

Refer: http://www.google.com/addurl/

I have already said that it was an addon domain. Again even Google cannot guarantee or predict that it will index all new domains.

Ok try this for me.

use the keyword you are trying to rank your un-indexed domain for as an anchor text link to that domain in your forum sig and see if its not indexed next month at this time.

Google Says so!

Refer: http://www.google.com/addurl/

We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.

why take it out of context?

I know how to get that domain to be indexed. I am still doing multiple tests.

Google Says so!

Refer: http://www.google.com/addurl/

We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.

why take it out of context?

One thing that really needs to get more stess in the SEO101 class is that you cannot take everything that Google says as the God given truth. They have been known to prevaricate more than a little.

Welll....yessssss....... but then excessive interlinking between any two sites is not going to go unnoticed.

Of course Google and SEs bots can detect that...

They know those that manipulate links can interlinking their websites together.. :D

Will running multiple sites under the same IP hurt SEO?


Only if there is too much interlinking that the SE would see as a manipulative attempt to boost SERP and PR.

In such case that you would want these sites to be interlinked, making them nofollow would be a good option to be on the safer side.

Actually, inway is probably correct about addon domain hurting SEO. Aaron Wall, the SEO expert (www.seobook.com) said the same thing in a forum posting recently:

Here is the question posted on his forum:
I was trying to set-up another domain of my shared hosting account. I realized that the new domain is created as a sub-domain to the original domain I set up my account with.

ex. newdomain.originaldomain.com

I talked to support and he told me that is how all shared hosting works. From my understanding I now have content from all my new sites indirectly connected to my original site? The host service is Bluehost.com

If this is the case should I just go with another hosting company to make sure my domains and content are kept separate. Aaron mentioned Pair as a good hosting company, do they do the same thing described above or is each domain totally separate?

Here is Aaron's answer:
you want your domains to be separate... like if somehow you get indexed under newdomain.olddomain.com you will have massive duplicate content issues.

You might like to check out this one: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/myth-busting-virtual-hosts-vs-dedicated-ip-addresses/

You might like to check out this one: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/myth-busting-virtual-hosts-vs-dedicated-ip-addresses/

Good link, but inway's point is about independent domains being set up as add-on domains on the same IP - when they get indexed, they will be treated as duplicate content and penalties will follow, as Aaron Wall pointed out.

If you have multiple domains added as add on domains , it will not not affect any SE rankings . I have 4 of my major sites all added as add on domains and they still possess quite attractive ranking for the select keywords.

....Google states that they will not index a domain unless they cannot find at least one link pointing to it and that is sufficient reason for your site not to be indexed, you don't have to look any further, Now you can make me look like a fool by showing us that the other domain was indeed indexed at the same time and that it does not have any links at all pointing to it, but I am willing to take my chances.I do not know where Google states that, but if they do they are lying. I had a parked domain get indexed that has NEVER been linked to or advertised in any way. It was a unique name I made up and registered then decided not to use. When I did a search for the name the only hit was a page listing new registrations (mine). After I built the site on another domain name, I found out Google had the parked domain indexed (apparently from registration records). I had to unpark it because it was competing with and actually ranking higher in the SERP than the page it was parked under.

I do not know where Google states that, but if they do they are lying. I had a parked domain get indexed that has NEVER been linked to or advertised in any way. It was a unique name I made up and registered then decided not to use. When I did a search for the name the only hit was a page listing new registrations (mine). After I built the site on another domain name, I found out Google had the parked domain indexed (apparently from registration records). I had to unpark it because it was competing with and actually ranking higher in the SERP than the page it was parked under.

Let me see what it is that you do not understand. You said that the page was not linked to from anywhere and then you said that there was a link from a page which listed new registrations???

Which is it?

Let me see what it is that you do not understand. You said that the page was not linked to from anywhere and then you said that there was a link from a page which listed new registrations???

Which is it?Why are you saying that I said there was a link from the page that listed new registrations? I did not say that. What I said was "has NEVER been linked to or advertised in any way".

EDIT: Unless google considers anything with ".com" a link whether it is linked or not, in which case all domains will be crawled/indexed upon registration rendering the point moot.

EDIT: Unless google considers anything with ".com" a link whether it is linked or not, in which case all domains will be crawled/indexed upon registration rendering the point moot.Edit again: That should have said "all domains will be 'linked to' upon registration rendering the point moot. Whether it gets indexed after a crawl will depend upon other google factors.

No, it will not hurt if your sites are spam/error free.

If your IP is clean, then the sites fetch good results on the web.