Negative SEO impact of two Similar Domains on Same IP

[AmberHanson]

Our ecommerce company has acquired a former competitor which has similar content & largely sells the same set of products. Both domains run on the same ecommerce platform version and do well organically on an overlapping set of keywords. Currently the websites are separate instances which are hosted separately. There is no interlinking or cross branding between the sites.

Since each brand has strong equity & SEO, there are no plans to combine brands or domains.

For several reasons, it would be ideal to combine platform instances and hosting, but we are concerned about potential SEO impact of shared IP addresses.

Is it likely that moving the sites to the same IP/C-Block could have a negative SEO impact since they rank  on the same keywords. Would Google devalue one site if they were seen to be connected or owned by the same company?

I know this issue has been addressed for domains with more variance between products and content, but since there is a large overlap (but not duplicate content) between our two domains, we wanted additional insight.

Obviously there are other SEO factors when you move a site, but we are currently trying to understand this specific factor.

Thanks Community for your help!

-Amber

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Amber

The server or IP address has little to no effect on SEO. Your biggest concern is having a server that is close to your audience in terms of geographic location, that it is fast, and that you are not encumbered by the traffic to any other sites sharing the same IP.

For this reason, always go for a dedicated server which will have it's own unique IP and SSL certificate. Locate the second site on a separate server. The fact that they share the same neighbourhood or range of IP's is irrelevant.

We have covered this before so this thread might be of interest to you:

https://moz.com/community/q/ip-address-of-server-an-seo-factor

I hope that helps,

Kind Regards

Nigel