If I have 10 ip's on one server and one website per IP. Each design is unique and all run off the same DB plus none of the sites are linked together, would the major search engines penalize this type of set up?
All the sites are basically the same theme, genre etc but all content is unique.
As long as the content is unique and comes up naturally (not 1000 pages over-night), than you'll be ok, no matter how many sites you have on one server.
You will be perfectly fine. I wouldn't even give this a second thought. :)
Your set-up is perfectly fine, but if you use *very* bad SEO practices (ie the kind that will get you banned from Google) with one of the sites, I believe it can carry over to the other sites.
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