I have three sites two of which are experiencing the same trademark suppression penalty and here is the history: In scanning the Google Webmaster forum for the subject "trademark suppression penalty" (not ranking for your own domain name), I discovered a thread that discussed this penalty in the context of multiple domains under the same DNS. I setup my main primary domain site 2 years ago using a Hostgator shared server account with unlimited domains. The second site was setup 18 months ago as an add-on domain. I went through and did all the typical site development and content creation. This second site ranked well for about 2-3months and died in the rankings. As I stated above, this rankings issue has persisted for the past 9 months. Well, I then setup a third unrelated site as a second add-on domain to the main one three months ago. I went through and did all of the same development and content creation for that niche. Low and behold, three months into the mission, this site had experienced the same "trademark suppression" severe penalty. Obviously, all three sites share the same IP and C-class. The coincidence of the two add-on domains having their rankings tank three months into the process made me question what I was doing wrong. The Google webmaster thread suggested that Google will view all 3 sites in this scenario as redundant even though the content and backlinks are totally unique. The three domains do not link to each other in any way. The primary domain has always had great rankings which have been very stable. Question 1: Does Google view all three sites as redundant since they share the same public_html folder of the primary which means they can still be accessed as subdomains of the primary? Question 2: Did I create my own problem here by the way I structured the setup of these 3 sites? Question 3: Would transferring all these 3 sites onto their own dedicated IP and C-Class remedy this common rankings problem? Question 4: How could the secondary add-on domains ever have ranked well for the first 2-3 months as they did? Please excuse the naive questions here, but I'm hoping this points to the root of my problem? Many Thanks George
I don't think Google can tell the difference between an add-on domain and a separate account on the same IP. I do think that sites on shared hosting accounts are more difficult to rank because of all the spammy sites you could potentially be sharing an IP with. It just makes sense for Google to be more strict with sites coming from bad neighborhoods. I recommend you move to a dedicated server or VPS. Oh, and as for your fourth question, it's a pretty common occurrence for new sites to get "honeymoon" traffic before Google decides where they belong in its index.