One platform, multiple niche sites: Worth $60/mo so each site has different class C?

[qurve]

Howdy all,

The short of it is that I currently run a very niche business directory/review website and am in the process of expanding the system to support running multiple sites out of the same database/codebase.

In a normal setup I'd just run all the sites off of the same server with all of them sharing a single IP address, but thanks to the wonders of the cloud, it would be fairly simple for me to run each site on it's own server at a cost of about $60/mo/site giving each site a unique IP on a unique c-block (in many cases a unique a-block even.)

The ultimate goal here is to leverage the authority I've built up for the one site I currently run to help grow the next site I launch, and repeat the process.

The question is: Is the SEO-value that the sites can pass to each other worth the extra cost and management overhead? I've gotten conflicting answers on this topic from multiple people I consider pretty smart so I'd love to know what other people say.

[SEOKeith]

Not enough info to answer, that would depend on how many links you have pointing at the niche sites and how much traffic / revenue each website makes you per month?

[qurve]

The first site I have is doing about 250k page views/mo, generating around $2k/mo, and still growing, I'm not yet sure where the plateau is.

I expect that the other sites will do well, but possibly not as well as the original since I was able to boost the first site using an unrelated domain I own with massive authority in the exact same niche.

My concern is that when I launch new sites in niches where I have no presence I won't be able to "bootstrap" them quite as easily as I did the first one. This led me to think that my main way of link building all these sites is to just have them interlink with each other but my understanding is that sites that link to each other on the same /24 don't pass much juice, if any at all, hence the idea of putting each site on it's own server/IP.

The real questions are really:

1. Is putting the sites on separate servers with different c-block IPs going to allow me to pass more goodness from the original site to the other sites?
2. If so, is it worth $60/mo and the additional overhead of managing multiple servers or is the advantage not that big?

Thanks for answering!

[activitysuper]

I suppose the question really is, could that extra $60 be used somewhere else that would benefit the SEO more then hosting the sites on different IP's.

Personally I would go with one server and use the $60 on SEO, ive seen a video from Matt Cutts saying its fine to inter-link websites but make sure they are relevant to each other.

If its a directory you must have been collecting email address? Can you not use the email db to expose the new directory to these users?

[qurve]

Thanks for the feedback, there may be better places to allocate that budget.

Due to the nature of the site it doesn't collect many registrations at the moment, it's mostly people coming in off of search, finding what they need and leaving. Building out a better funnel for converting visitors is the next development task after the multi-tenancy is fixed.