Digital Marketing and SEO Services from an IT Admin Perspective

One licensed activity that my company does under consulting is actually online marketing, promotion and SEO.  But today I thought I’d shed some light on the admin part of it.  And yes, we know SEO is always changing but our clients have found a lot of things aren’t exactly as Google has promised.

If we’re on the same page, hopefully we don’t agree that “the best content” will just “rank well” and Google will reward you.  Yes, Google says many things that generally sound like they make sense but the rules are constantly changing under the guise of “we don’t want anyone to game the system” or in my experience of nearly 25 years, that the most legitimate small to midsize companies, who are not spammers or blackhat SEO maniacs, will find the next Google update wipes them out.  And of course they will often be offered to signup for Google Adwords around the same time.

But with that said I thought I’d share a few secret observations that we’ve seen consistently for some time.

Google constantly says that “IPs” and “neighborhoods” don’t matter, but in the past they have said it matters.  There is not always a “one size fits all answer” but if you ask Gemini enough times, it will tell you it matters or you might find this out yourself.

The issue first hit our radar when we acquired a large SEO/hosting company as a client.  At some point they migrated ALL of their client sites to a single IP.  Luck would have it that with their huge client base that they had “overlap” or “interclient competition”.  They started noticing that if for example they had clients in Colorado that were ranking for “home renovation” that only 1 site would rank among many others.

None of this should have been a problem for Google, each site about home renovation was genuinely a different company, but to Google, we suspect they treated the similar competing sites as either being a PBN (Private Blog Network) or filtered them as the “same owner”.  The only obvious proof or confirmation we got is that it stayed that way for weeks, until we started migrating the sites with issues to their own IP addresses.  Once that happened within days, the “similar competing sites”, suddenly all ranked in Google where they used to be, before being put on a shared IP.

Google may say that a “neighborhood” or shared IP is not a problem but I’d like to disagree to be safe.  The other issue is of course if you care about your company and traffic, you should NEVER use anything with a shared IP.  Many SEO and marketing companies don’t have the technical expertise that our company has, so they will tend to put all of their client sites on the same IP.

I am sure if you ask Gemini enough times you may get a different answer and different communities and companies may have a different answer, but for our clients, the answer is clear.  Avoid having any competing or similar sites on the same IP or you could be filtered or treated as a PBN.  The only way to do this is to use semi-dedicated setups like a VM with its own IP(s) or preferably Dedicated Servers with their own IP(s).  Another issue we’ve seen is filtering based on past bad behaviour, a lot of the “cheap Cloud companies” are often the source of all kinds of abuse, not only hacking, but often blackhat SEO tactics.  Google claims they don’t care about your IP but we have seen sites struggle and then suddenly take off after moving them to a confirmed clean IP that we have access to.

Now the technical part is that for most Digital Marketers, they are not IT experts, they are not familiar with terms like /24, ASN or different Class C network.  Fortunately, we are and have found creative ways to make it easier to manage hundreds of thousands of sites for SEO purposes with our custom setup that we do as part of our Consulting packages, that are nearly impossible for the average SEO company.

We’ve also saved our clients huge amounts of bandwidth and Cloud fees by combining the above with a custom, private CDN.  In some cases we’ve seen clients save 25-50% on the Cloud/Server fees because of the server optimization we did.

We did a quick prompt with Gemini, since it’s basically Google and see if it would “fess up” and eventually it did.

Prompt 1.)

We ask if sharing an IP matters and it says no, that they understand “sites could share an IP”.

Prompt 2.) 

We mention our client experience and how they moved thousands of sites to a single IP and now sites competing for the same keywords find that only 1 site ranks.

Gemini responds that it must be a coincidence.

 

Prompt 3.) 

We let Gemini know that SSL and performance issues were ruled out and how before the move to the shared IP, each site ranked fine.

Now you can see we finally get the right answer out of Gemini, they admit that they have a Diversity filter and also may have treated the sites as a PBN.

Prompt 4.)

We ask Gemini point blank and it finally admits that in this type of case it may treat all sites as having a common owner because of the shared IP.