Webmaster Forum / General / Search Engines / July 2008

I have a client who has about 100 dealers nation wide. Each of the
dealers will be purchasing their own domain name and will host a small
5-7 page site with unique information about their services. Each
dealer site will also have a list of the products which are shown on
the main site, so this will be duplicate content. To avoid any dupe
content penalties, we are going to restrict robots from that content.

My question, however, is in regards to how those 100 dealer sites
should be hosted. From a management perspective, it is easiest to host
them all on the same server. Would there be any negative implications
in regards to setting something up like this? we realize that those
100 dealer sites will probably not help the overall link popularity
for the main site so we don't expect to do this to try and drive up
rankings by adding 100 incoming links. However, each of the dealers
wants to get ranked locally. If all the sites are hosted this way,
will it cause any issues with the dealer sites getting ranked for geo
targeted terms? In other words, would it be better to tell each dealer
to go out and find a hosting company on their own so all the sites
appear to be owned and hosted independently?

Thanks!