WhoIs penalty

[seoman10]

Does anyone know if it's possible to get a penalty on WHOIS data and a shared IP address?

We had some bad SEO done (And at ranking demolished) on one of our company websites which has the same WHOIS data and is on the same IP address as another side which is just seems to have taken a knock.

Is it possible Google could have associated both and penalised accordingly?

[ClaytonJ]

It is possible though I have not heard of it before. Data easily scrapable by google.  Where I have heard google made a penalty link is via WMT's.  Could they also have also been connected via WMT's at some stage?

Hope that helps.

[Malika1]

Couple of things that i can think of that might have happen are -

1. Same IP address (1 signal to Google - its a big signal) as mentioned by you

2. Was the reason behind the penalty your backlinks profile? Chances are that you got same sort of backlinks for the other website too.

3. Signal 1 and 2 combined can give Google indication of 'notorious' activities conducted by the 'controller' (SEO company) of these websites (your websites)

Couple of things to ask -

1. Are these two websites in question from the same industry and serving the same market?

2. Do you have backlinks coming from same sources

3. Are there any other websites on the same IP address that have been penalized? I do know that websites on a c-block can be penalized.

4. Is there any direct relation between the two websites apart from shared IP address? ex - Links of each other on the website in partners, about us or contact us etc. pages?

[MarieHaynes]

Here's Matt Cutts on this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9Ka0fzyZbk

His answer is basically saying that in almost every case you could not be affected by the fact that there were other spammy sites sharing your hosting. He said that there are really rare cases whereby if one host has a crazy amount of spammy sites they may take action on all of these sites, but he made a point of saying that this is really rare.

So no, I'd be looking for some other cause for the rankings to drop.