While Google was the pioneer, other search engines like MSN and Yahoo were also employing similar methods of ranking sites based on links. Linking was the new game for webmasters seeking to increase rankings.
Like many others earlier in the game I linked all of my sites to each other to spread my traffic around.
Not long after I noticed that Google had actually banned and blacklisted some of my ever growing stable of web sites.
It appeared that Google banned my sites for no other reason than my sites were on the same server, and noticed that I had been inter linking my own sites together. I wasn’t trying to game them, I just used the power of my own traffic to advertise my own web sites to each other. But obviously Google placed so much importance on “link popularity” and as a factor for determining PageRank, that they felt it was “un-natural” for my sites to have so many links from the same network and as such dropped my domains from their index.
My sites were banned and then became “bad neighborhoods”.
Yes, when a site is banned Google will penalize other sites that link to the banned site. So as a general rule, make sure to never link to other sites that are NOT indexed by Google. A filter could trigger a red flag and they’d look at your site because it linked to a “bad neighborhood”.
How severe the penalty is, we do not know for sure, but as there is no upside to linking to a site that has been banned by Google, why take a chance.
As I learned more about the importance of links, I needed to find ways to prevent more sites of mine from getting banned. I had a problem because all my sites were on one big jumbo server and even though they had separate IP addresses (20 of them) they still were all in the same class C IP block.
At that point I was determined to find a way to stay in the game and prevent more sites from getting banned, and as with most obstacles to making money, I found solutions and continued on.
If Link Popularity and high PageRank was the key to higher rankings, I needed to find a way to play the game yet not break their golden rules.
At that point I discovered that the prices of dedicated servers had fallen from the obscene amounts that I had been paying for my one beefy dedicated machine. As a high traffic internet marketer I was spending $3,500. bucks a month just to keep one server that wouldn’t constantly crash because of the massive spikes I’d have in traffic. After all, a #1 ranking for a popular search term like the single word “music” or “money” or “free” could easily bring in 50,000 unique visitors a day. Get a few top tens for huge traffic keywords like those and even the manliest of servers would crash.
But what good was having a robust server when I wouldn’t be able to link my own sites with each other???
As it turned out I was able to buy a couple of servers for far less than I was paying. This enabled me to spread out my domains so they were not all on the same host. The advantage to this is that I could be less worried about linking my sites together and possibly even more important, I was able to reach out to other webmasters and create custom link exchanges offering them links from sites on several servers. This is a great incentive and helped me get some good quality links improving the link popularity and PageRank of my web sites. If you have more than a handful of sites, I suggest you consider spreading them on different hosts and perhaps even dedicated servers. That way you'll stay one step from the risk of your domains becoming bad neighborhoods!
Mike Liebner is a skilled SEO and the author of the popular free Article Marketing News newsletter and includes a free 19 page PDF Special Report with over 60 minutes of video. The AUKDAT Keyword Density Analyzer is available at
www.articleunderground.com/webmaster/keyword-density-tool.html for free online at and will tell you how many 2 and 3 word keyword phrases are on your web page plus it also checks meta tags and titles too!
