Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?

[eglove]

I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it.

While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me.

Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues?

Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/

[Alick300]

Hi Ethan,

I will say yes & no. Please watch below Matt cutts video on the exact issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsSwqo16C8s&noredirect=1

I hope it helps.

Thanks

[MattAntonino]

If you don't use the site in Google, you should noindex it just to clear up any potential issues (especially if the domains link together in any way.)

• Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/

Download the full site and open all the pages in Notepad++.  Find & replace.  Save, reupload.

[TomRayner]

Hi Ethan

In theory - yes it could.  We know that Google looks at a domain's Class-C IP level (at least - now that Google is a registrar it may extend to the full IP) when judging its quality.  If a site is in a "bad neighbourhood" - ie sitting on an IP range with a number of 'spam' sites - then theoretically it could be affected, as a kind of guilty by association.

However, in reality I have some doubts as to whether this would happen.  The fact is that the vast majority of the web uses shared hosting (particularly sme's) and so good sites are invariably always going to be mixed in with 'bad' sites.  And what's stopping me from deliberately making a bad site on your IP in order to 'poison it'?  I'm no way near that evil, but someone might be.

What I'm getting at here is that it seems extremely unlikely that there is a manageable way to differentiate these sites efficiently - which leads me to believe that having your spam site on the same IP as some 'good' sites _shouldn't _make a difference.

What you can do to reduce this risk even further would be to make sure the 'spam' site doesn't link to any properties of yours that you want to protect, to nofollow those links if feasible (not sure what CMS you're using but WordPress has a few plugins that would do this on bulk) and, if it isn't required, noindexing the site would pretty much get rid of all risk completely.

Hope this helps!

[eglove]

@Tom Roberts, your thinking is about on the same page as mine. I've always been suspect of "C-Blocks" as a ranking too.  I don't use a CMS for this site, as I said it's all hard coded. Does the nofollow tag in the head section have the same effect as a nofollow on individual links? At least PHP could solve that issue pretty easily.