200+ ip addresses on a single server? 1

[jmille34]

Is there any technical drawback to running 200+ live ip addresses to a single 2003 server and having one for each web site? We have a company asking us about it and having something to do with search engine optimization. It's really just one web site, but they have blahblah.com as the corporate site and then blahblah-city.com for a city and blahblah-othercity.com for another city, etc, and something like 180 or so cities total. This company has gotten quotes from two other companies that both recommended splitting up onto a whole server farm, and I'm not opposed to doing that as long as it's being done for the right reason. Is there a technical reason why if a single server with 1 address and 180 sites could not be converted to 200 addresses and 180 sites? If they want redundancy, that's fine, but that's a separate issue, right?

 

[WhoKilledKenny]

It sounds like they want to add external links to their web-site from multiple external sites. In search engine optimization this is known a link equity. In theory what they are attempting to do will work. The idea is to make it look like 180 sites indorse the main web-site. High link equity is a variable that determines Search Engine Ranking Position aka SERPs. The problem with what they are doing, attempting to fake out google may actually backfire. Google (and other SEs) will get suspecious of all the sites that have links if the IPs of each site are in the same range. This will actually hurt SERPs and could even ban the site.

Back to your technical question: managing the web-site IPs is the only real drawback.

Jesse Hamrick

http://www.powershellpro.com

 

[jmille34]

Ahh, thanks, and thanks. Sounds like a pair of headaches.