Virtual domains, non ip-intensive hostig, and search engine spiders

Virtual domains, non ip-intensive hosting, and search engine spiders

Several people have asked about whether there was any
problem using one IP for several domain names, specifically
whether or not search engines would properly index such pages.

Below is a copy an email a sent in response to such a query,
which may be informative for you as well. A couple years ago,
search engine experts advised us to have unique IP addresses
for each domain because at the time the spiders had not been
updated to properly index such sites. This advice is still
sometimes repeated because people do not know that the spiders
were all updated long ago. Read this email for more info and
exact quotes from the search engines themselves.

    The potential problem with search engines is
if you are sharing an IP with another customer,
who gets that IP banned.  Since you have the IP
all to yourself, there should be no problem.

We asked Altavista about this:
Us:   "Are there any issues of submitting from the same IP
address for multiple domains and or domains using the
same ip address?"

Altavista tech support: "For the most part, I wouldn't see
a shared IP# to be any trouble unless one of them got
banned for spamming."


    As far as the other search engines, we asked them,
and asked Danny Sullivan of search engine watch.
The tech guys from the other engines said that it
was absolutely not a problem, as did Mr. Sullivan.

Excite says:
"As long as the spider can reach the pages and domains
easily, there is no limit to how many domains you can
have [at one IP] .
....
Our spider does not index based solely on IP address
...
In the past most of our indexing was IP address based (one
domain per IP) but we have moved away from this ..."

With this knowledge, we suggest that you not use a single
IP for a large number of webmasters, because one webmaster
might spam the search engines and cause a problem.

We feel that the appropriate course of action is to assign
one IP to each webmaster, to be shared by all of their domains.
This also reduces the chance that a webmaster will be assigned
an IP address that has been banned, because the spammers don't
get a large number of IPs banned.

How ever, we also feel that it is appropriate to use more than
one IP if a single webmaster hasmore than 10 IPs. By putting only
10 domains on each IP, you can comply with the spirit of the
ARIN mandate while not overusing a single IP address.