Can Other Websites You Own Affect Your Rankings?

[DerekP]

Let's say you own three websites. One is low quality and Google frowns upon it, another is moderate and a third has stellar unique content.

Would Google penalize the third website because you own the first website?

On a related note - If you were banned from Google AdWords, would registering a site in your name potentially harm your rankings?

[PeterAlexLeigh]

If I were you I'd start with a new google account just to be sure that nothing negative is carried across... but that may just be my sceptical view.

Being very pre-cautious if I wanted to make sure that nothing negative affected the quality site, I would also probably put the lesser quality sites into a different analytics account. But like Barry says, if they're hosted on the same server dedicated server or in the same IP range than google can make an educated guess that they're linked.

In the longer term, why don't you begin bring the other sites up to the same standard of quality as the best one, then you've got nothing to fear.

[DerekP]

Hmm - Good to know. What do you think about having the same Google Analytics account?

[StalkerB]

It could; but unless you've been very bad, I wouldn't imagine that you would be penalized .

Google is a registrar, so has access to the whois details on all your domains, but if it's used I doubt it's for any sort of automatic penalty.

If you host your sites on the same server, again, Google can see that, but is unlikely to effect each other unless there's some cross linking - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/myth-busting-virtual-hosts-vs-dedicated-ip-addresses/ - (I presume that link is still mostly true).

If you don't link the Google account to the new sites then there shouldn't be any automatic penalty applied either, just make sure and follow the rules regarding not opening a new adwords account.

Always exceptions, but you're probably okay.

[irvingw]

I would also advise you not to link from the high quality site into the low quality site. Outbound links to spammy sites may cause guilt by association. Also, do not overlink from the low quality to the quality site as Google may flag that as well. Do not be concerned about the AdWords penalty. I know sites that got bounced from AdWords and nothing ever happened to their rankings.

[DerekP]

Hey Bryce,

Thanks man. I'm actually just getting into SEO after several years in paid traffic. I intend on using pretty much just whitehat tactics, a lot of which I learned from SEOmoz.

I don't think I necessarily have the best reputation with Google, so I was just seeing if that might come back around to haunt me.

[brycebertola]

I don't think that google would penalize one site because it shares a common owner with another site of poor value. However, it's likely that the common owner utilized the same tactics across all sites and something THEY have done could have caused the penalty.

As far as the ban on AdWords, again, I don't think it would negatively affect a site right out of the gate.

If you've been banned from AdWords and you have multiple sites suffering a penalty, It sounds like there's an issue with the overall approach to SEO.