What is the best practice when a client is setting up multiple sites/domains

[Dan-171803]

I have a client that is creating separate websites to be used for different purposes.  What is the best practice here with regards to not looking spammy.  i.e. do the domains need to registered with different companies?  hosted on different servers, etc?

Thanks in advance for your response.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Dan,

I'm curious about what you are not communicating as much as what you are. If every site is unique, and if every site contains high quality, optimized content, and has a high quality inbound link profile / social buzz initiative, then there should be no problem with hosting them on the same IP block.  Unless the plan is to use them to cross-link to each other.  Except the value of that strategy would only come from all sites having the same related topical focus.

If the goal is several sites all being related and cross-linking to each other, or to try and dominate the 1st page of search results with multiple domains for the same search queries, then they should all ideally be on different IP blocks across multiple hosts and in different geographic locations.

Except that kind of strategy requires significantly more effort since every site will need quality depth of content, regular freshness of content, and ongoing link building and social efforts. So it's usually better to just have one single site that all efforts can be applied to.