Servers matter for different domains for same keywords?

[TheDude]

We have 3 domains in the same industry, but unique content on each site.  The whois info is private, but the domains are all under the same owner registrant info.

In terms of rankings, does it matter if we move them all into the same RackSpace cloud account?  Will Google know the relationship somehow and if they do, will they care?

[TheDude]

Bump

[TheDude]

All sell the same insurance products.  All are white hat going forward, but here is a summary of their basic history.

Site A:

• 12 years old
• Penguin algorithmic penalty (disavowed in January, waiting for update)

Site B:

• 6 years old
• Penguin algorithmic penalty (disavowed in January, waiting for update)
• Manual link penalty last summer (since lifted)

Site

• 3 years old
• No penalties

The companies have common interests, but different ownership.

My fear is that Google would think we are all the same and decide to rank 1 of the 3 sites for each keyword even though the content is unique and written by different people.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

Like Ryan mostly said already it depends on what your goals are with the site. If they're black/grey hat Google will care about the domains being on the same C block (same IP range). But if they don't have this intention you wouldn't notice any difference in rankings.

[Ryan-Bradley]

Depending on your goals for the three sites you may not have to "hide" it at all. Now if you have a mini link farm thing going on then you would definitely want to hide the whois info, as well as get hosting that can give you a different c-block ip address for each domain, try looking at http://seohosting.com/. But if the intention is "harmless" and you don't plan just using them as a way to link to each other (even though they still might in a whitehat way) you don't have to hide the info. Take opensiteexplorer.org and moz.com for example, it's clear that moz owns that site, but they don't feel the need to hide it because each site serves its own purpose.