Load Balancing and Its Effects on SEO

[critter]

Hello All,

I have a few questions.

We have a network of 6-7 websites. Each website is contained within one common theme. We are thinking of putting each block of similarly related websites on one common C BLOCK with unique IP's.

Is this ok?

As well, because of our traffic we need to have redundant servers(mirror sites) for load balancing. Can this hamper ones search engine rankings?

Cheers

CRITTER

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

1) If the websites are already running on seperate domains then it will be perfect to have them hosted on individual IPs - and C-classes.

2) Load balancing can be done in many ways. Some ways I have seen result in directing traffic to different URLs - for example www1, www2 and www3. This is a very bad strategy for search engines. However load balancing can also be done so the URLs stay the same and thats what you should do. Look at Google.com they have many clusters around the world but the URL stay the same no matter who you are or where you connect from.

[critter]

Hi Mike,

We do the load balancing using mirror sites sitting on a seperate IP, but to Google and the user its seemless as you hit the same website URL no matter the load balancing.

Getting 6 Seperate C BLOCKS seems quite expensive and if the 6 websites are within one common theme and don't cross link much wouldn't it be ok to have them on one c block with unique IP's?

Critter

[rustybrick]

Originally Posted by critter

Getting 6 Seperate C BLOCKS seems quite expensive and if the 6 websites are within one common theme and don't cross link much wouldn't it be ok to have them on one c block with unique IP's?

If it was me, I wouldn't spend a lot more for different c blocks.

[I, Brian]

Originally Posted by critter

Getting 6 Seperate C BLOCKS seems quite expensive

Separate C blocks shouldn't be expensive, as you're basically just talking about buying IPs from different ranges, rather than an actual full C block set of IPs.

The expense should come from the servers and administrating their set-up, rather than the IP allocations.

[risk]

Originally Posted by Mikkel deMib Svendsen

2) Load balancing can be done in many ways. Some ways I have seen result in directing traffic to different URLs - for example www1, www2 and www3. This is a very bad strategy for search engines. However load balancing can also be done so the URLs stay the same and thats what you should do. Look at Google.com they have many clusters around the world but the URL stay the same no matter who you are or where you connect from.

this is a good point. now, you probably don't want (and can't for that matter) do load balancing the way google does because google uses some combination of geotargetted dns and anycast load balancing. your best choice is probably an inline layer 3 or layer 4 load balancing solution depending on your session affinity requirements. feel free to post here or pm me if you'd like some advice on the technical side of things, since load balancing (as 50 cent would say) bought me my car, my crib, my jewels and all my fancy things ;]

-rsk