The Chatterbox

Google and Mulitiple Site

There are some indications that Google may be looking much more closely at the relationship between sites that are in the same market.

Please note that from my observations this appears to be Keyword Specific, especially on reasonably competitive (or money) keyword phrases.

What does that statement mean? Well it means that sites are not being penalized just because they happen to be sitting on the same IP number or same IP range as another site that is doing something rather iffy. It does however mean that if there is a connection between two sites that are both competing on the same highly valued search phrases, one may show up and the other not.

It is difficult to ascertain at this time whether Google is looking at IP/Server information, WhoIs information, Linking between the sites or a combination of the above and a lot more.

If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that they're looking at a multitude of things, including the above. We know that links are important to Google, so it would make sense that they are analyzing that portion.

It would also make a lot of sense that they would be looking at the IP number or IP range of two or more sites that are competing for the same competitive keyword phrase(s).

It certainly wouldn't be out of the realm of imagination that they would also be looking at WhoIs data, or even text blocks within certain sections of the page content to determine if two sites were closely related.

I ran across this one quite by accident. I run two sites that provide a very similar service to two completely different markets. Even though they are targeted at different market segments, the sites of course compete on a few very general, and quite competitive, keyword phrases.

I made a boo-boo on the server side of things that caused one of these sites, the one that has always ranked pretty well, that caused Googlebot to have a few heart palpatations. I caught it right away, but Googlebot had already been by and freaked out.

So that site that always had a decent ranking was dropped out of Google's index for a few days, while I waited for them to re-spider the site and see that all was well.

A very interesting thing happened when this Site #1 disappeared.

Suddenly, the other site that we'll call Site #2, started to appear for certain reasonably competitive phrases in almost the exact same SERP positions that Site #1 had been dropped for!

Let me say that again so that it sinks in.

• Site #1 has a temporary problem and gets completely dropped.


• As soon as that happens Site #2 starts to show up on those competitive phrases that it has never been in the Top 100 for before.


• The moment that Site #1 gets re-spidered and re-indexed, returning to its normal position, Site #2 gets banished again to position 130 or so.
  

Let me note here that the fact that Site #2 doesn't show up for these very generic phrases. It is targeted at a very specific market segment and I really don't want it to show up under the general phrase. You know me, I'm all about ROI. I want people who make it there to be the exact people who would most benefit by the service.

In the search engine's eyes they may be competing sites. In mine they're not since they target different market segments.

That said, it was very interesting. And something I posed to some friends in the SEO field.

Some have seen the same thing, though we've not yet been able to put our finger in what the trigger might be. I have a feeling it's a multiple trigger.

My sites absolutely set off all of those triggers. Both sites sit on the same IP number/range, both sites target (in the search engines mind) some of the same phrases and both sites have identical WhoIs information. They also link to each other once or twice so that I can try to get potential customers to the place they actually belong, instead of us having to sort it out after the fact.

But that's it. The other links pointing at the two sites are totally different. They are different markets, even though the service is very similar in a general sense, so the links pointing to the sites are totally different.

Is Google over-reacting in their hope of removing sites that are owned by the same person, and have a close relationship, but offer the same thing?

Perhaps. But I'm not going to complain about it too much. They really do need to knock down all of those fake sites that are built as an attempt to increase PageRank and deliver more traffic. Whether it is qualified traffic or not.

On the other hand, in a perfect world both of the little sites I noticed this on should probably show up. Both are legitimate, full-service sites that happen to offer a similar service to two different market segments. There is zero duplicate content, save a copyright notice. The design of the two sites is totally differnt.

A human reading the two sites would immediately realize that the sites are about as different as two sites can get while offering something similar.

Which just goes to prove two points...

1. The search engines are not nearly as smart as people are.
2. Legitimate sites are once again paying the price for Google trying to come up with a machine-oriented solution to the problems they have created themselves.