optimization question

How bad will trading links w/ your own sites on the same server be in regards to PR and Google positioning?

Will it hurt?

If you sites are different, not duplicates, it's a great thing to do. To my knowledge, Google does not check who owns the site nor does Google care if two sites are on the same server, in fact, Google does not know what site is on what server. Sure, they could detect this information, but as far I as know, they have no reason to do that.

However, if your sites are related, like two sites about renting apartments, your competitors might report you to Google.

Bompa

Accually Google does care now. They've institued LocalRank.

Thanks for the reference.

In reading that article, the first thing that strikes me is that the author clearly points out that he is repeating the theories of others, not known facts.

Also, according to his explanation of LocalRank, owners and servers are still not figured into the equation, but simply the interconnectedness, (reciprocal linking), of the pages. He then states that more interconnectivity means higher ranking, (not penalizing).

Take a look at his paragraph labeled Evidence. It starts like this: "One piece of evidence that everyone jumped to conclusions about ...", hehe, and ends with: "But that was a mistake".

It's clear, to me at least, that the author realizes that he is speculating on the speculations of others. The problem is that many readers will take bits and pieces of an article like that and quote it as fact.

Oh yah, he ends his article with this:

"Reminder
Don't forget that all this is just theory, ..."


The bottom line is this.

1. If the statement is not derived from a test, it's just opinion.

2. If the test results are not publicly documented, it's a hoax.

3. The test results are only as credible as the person conducting the test.

I know of only two publicly documented search results tests. One is my own and the other I found months ago with a "PageRank" search. I'll look for that again when I have time and post it here. I do remember that it was done by a guy with a very Chinese name, heh.



Bompa

Good points. I'll be sure to reread things a bit more next time. I was in a bit of a rush so yea.

Oh and I never said they penalized people for interlinking sites. Your words not mine.

Sorry, didn't mean to imply that.

LocalRank theories are based on a published Google patent. Whether Google uses the patented algo or not is unknown, but it is indeed a patent owned by Google and therefore we suspect that Google may have partially instituted it.





Not servers per se, but IP's. And sites on the same server usually have the same or similar IP.

This is direct from Google's patent:



Again, Google may or may not have used this patent - that is unknown.

I agree that Google probably uses IP addresses for websites rather than the actual server names. It makes sense if you think about it: an IP address for one is an efficient way to store a site's name, and at the same time, also lets you know which sites are stored on the same servers and potentially the same owners. I think the original Google stanford paper describes how it indexes sites by IP, though I should check if this is true.

Then again...many webhosting companies put multiple sites on the same server for obvious cost reasons, which is the only reason I figure Google would distinguish sites by their names rather than IPs. Most quality websites have a unique server IP though...

The quality of a site has absolutely nothing to do with having
a unique ip or sharing an ip.


Bompa