Benefit of Diversifying Your Hosting Providers

[WebbyNabler]

Is there a benefit to diversifying your hosting providers?  I mean if there are 10 client sites on one shared hosting package and they all have links to my company because we give ourselves credit on all the sites we build. Will Google give the links to me less weight or even look at it as some link building scheme? Does private registration prevetn things like this. Would it help if i got my own IP's from different C blocks?  Thank you in advance Mozzer family!!

[AlanBleiweiss]

First of all, giving yourself credit with links to your site on your client sites is not recommended. The relevance is very low, placement is not within content that would likely be relevant even to that site's topical focus, and if there is anything more than one link coming from each site, the link to root domain ratio is going to be of concern.

If you go so far as to have that link be in footer or sidebar areas, that lowers their trust signal even further.

In light of how important quality, relevance and frequency are in 2013, there's no true reason to be doing this unless the links are nofollowed, because based on all these considerations, if they're not nofollowed, they're clearly manipulative in nature only.

If you insist on having links from every client for some reason, and if you choose to ignore the nofollow recommendation, you could attempt to mitigate the potential damage by spreading client sites across different hosting providers.  Is that process worth the effort to gain what little bit of SEO value you might gain otherwise?

And for the record, different c blocks are not enough in today's world.  One host, many c blocks- all still the same host.  Pretty obvious in the detection cycle.

[WebbyNabler]

Interesting... thank you for that insight.  I really had no idea the "Designed by" credit could be a negative thing.  I do want the credit there, but I am going to take under serious consideration your recommendation on "no-follow"

Thanks again, much appreciated!!!

[ThompsonPaul]

And of course having different "C blocks" would in no way be enough to separate the sites in the eyes of the search engines.

Just for starters, you'd also need to ensure none of the following are shared between any of the sites:

• Analytics accounts, whether Google or other 3rd parties
• Google and Bing Webmaster Tools accounts
• Adwords/Adsense accounts (or probably any other ad networks)
• domain registrar accounts

So as Allan says, totally not worth it for the slight potential gain. There's no way they can be considered "natural" so only use them if they're useful to actually drive human traffic ("hmm.. nice-looking site, I wonder who built it") and then nofollow as Alan recommends.

[WebbyNabler]

Great input!  Thanks for taking the time to respond, I truly appreciate it!