Same IPs and Whois

plazas-ps · #1 (**permalink**) 05-11-2004, 01:23 PM

My company does design, hosting and seo for physicians across the country. Back in February we seemed to have lost all of our Google positions, and we are still trying different things to see whats going on. One of the things someone mentioned was the fact that all our sites (about 140) were on the same IP address and had very similar Whois information, and they linked between themselves. They all have very different content, specifically related to that doctor and their practice. We perform real well on MSN and Yahoo but just nowhere to be found on Google, are they penalizing us because of the IPs? or because we are linking our sites with each other in a national resource list?
Any help would be really really really appreciated!

jestep · #2 (**permalink**) 05-11-2004, 02:31 PM

It sounds like there could be a couple of things going on here. If google decides to ban a site because of smap they often ban the entire Ip address. Unfortunately many websites using a virtual server setup like yours are all on the same website which would cause all of the sites to be banned. Another reason is that google could be seeing a link farm type site ring. Google will penalize for many sites being innerlinked on the same IP address. If your sites were all innerlinked this is what I would suspect happened. If your sites aren't innerlinked I would geuss that google saw a site and for one reason or another banned them and the ip. Either way I think it would be a good idea to get seperate IP's for each site. Also, are any of you sites still listed in the google index or are they completely gone. Try using site:yoursite.com in google to see if they are still in the index. If they are I wouls guess that they are being penalized and should make some recovery if you switch the IP's.

plazas-ps · #3 (**permalink**) 05-11-2004, 02:47 PM

All the sites are still listed on the Google index (site:yoursite.com), with a bunch of pages for each one showing up, but they just dont come up under the keywords we are targeting.
How long do you think it would take for us to be able to see a change onces we switch IPs?
Should each site have its own IP or could we group them by like sets of 5?

jestep · #4 (**permalink**) 05-11-2004, 02:55 PM

It would probably take effect in the next update which is in about a week or 2. 5 would probably be ok, Im not positive on this. It would also be best if the sites on the IP are not related or linking.

Try posting your question in this forum, it has a ton of members involved in SEO and web design etc, and they should be able to give you a better, more specific answer on when your sites would start going back up in the search engines.
http://www.webworkshop.net/seoforum/index.php