Many webmasters now a days have networks of sites. Google has expressed that using them to artificially increase rankings can be hazardous. They have methods of identifying “networked” sites. There are several ways they go about this to take note on:

Site hosted on the same web servers
Sites with similar IP addresses even if they are 22.231.113.64,  22.231.113.65
Similar site structure
Similar editors
Sites with the same CMS
Sites who use the same affiliate ID’s
Similar Adsense publisher code

Granted, Matt Cutts, Google spokesperson has stated that simply owning all the sites doesn’t automatically hurt you in the SERPS it’s just when you start to inter link them to build up artificial rankings in the search engines that you might start running into problems.

All three search engines have their individual formulas and handle/look/score them differently. In fact Google for one looks at them extremely differently then MSN/Yahoo. It is challenging to rank well for all three and not throw a filter in one of them while doing well in the other(s).

Below is a general scorecard of the differences in Yahoo/MSN vs. Google. with regards to backlinks.

Age – is a huge underling factor for Google. They put major emphasis on it weigh links that are old and thus “trusted” much heavier then newly acquired links.
This is a huge reason sites that are currently in the top of competitive phrases in Google are hard to out rank.
Yahoo/MSN look at links on a much more even playing field. It is easier to over come well established older sites in Yahoo and MSN than it is in Google.

Repetition – Repetition of keywords in site structure is more likely to throw a filter in Google whereas MSN/Yahoo might not mind it or subsequently look at it as a good thing.

Link Juice – Ie. Link weight/ link relevancy might not be passed by all links in the eyes of Google. Google is generally smarter and more on top of defining a “untrustworthy link” then MSN or Yahoo thus MSN/Yahoo might count the link when Google ignores it.

Overall Google is tougher to rank in with younger, newer sites where MSN and Yahoo will respect a new site.

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