Hi guys, I've noticed here and on a number of other forums that it's a useless practice to interlink between two or more them related sites on the same Class C range. Supposedly, Google and Yahoo treat them all the same, and worse, if there is an abusive pattern, might ban the whole Class C. I question that for 2 reasons: 1) I have two sites with very limited links between them, both travel related: http://www.hotel-hunter.com and http://www.akulink.com, although the latter has a different main "theme". These both have a very different (albeit still very poor ranking in google). If the above is true, you would think they would have the same SERP for Google. This does not seem to be the case. 2) How could the search engines justify throwing all sites on a shared server into the same "lump" just because they share a Class C range?. With many ISP's a Class C range can be serving 10's of thousands of sites. And in most cases the sites on those servers have no idea who shares the same ip number. Just the ruminations of one confused soul...
Travel sites took a HUGE hit the during an update a few months back. If I am a betting man (which I am) I would guess that your poor rankings having nothing to do with the Class C theory and everything to do with duplicate conent. But then again I havent seen your site but I know travel sites "normally" are big on duplicate content since they all get their feeds from 1 source.
No, akulink site does much better than hotel hunter, but then it's been around longer. The other site was recently launched, and not heavily promoted, since I'm still not happy with the full functionality.
Backlinks is only one part of the google algorithm. On page factors, including domain name, page title, h1 tags, bolding text, where you keyword is located on the page, how many times it is used, etc., all affect your ranking. Even a left nav menu can affect how the bot sees your site i.e. it can put a ton of code into the page ahead of the first instance of your keyword. Google tends to favor content that is closer to the top of the page. Unless the sites are exactly the same (including coding), you are bound to see differences in ranking. If they are exactly the same, then you will have duplicate content issues. I've never heard of google banning an entire class C range. Their patent does talk about having the ability to discount or ignore the crosslinking of sites which come from the same class C. Google also has the ability to check registar information to see if two sites have the same owner. I guess it is possible that if google detects crosslinking from two sites on the same class "C" it flags the site for checking registar information? No one but google knows exactly what they do, but I have noticed that two sites I had linked did not pass PR to a site I own that had different IP's, but were with the same host. The purpose of the linking wasn't for passing PR, but I did notice the PR didn't pass. Hosting is so inexpensive, that if you want to cross link sites, you should just host the other site on a different class C. I wouldn't worry about a ban unless there are real abuse issues. I don't host with any provider that allows adult sites because I don't want any potential problems.
Mjewel, Thanks for your detailed input. That makes sense to me. Once I'm finished adding a few bells and whistles to it, my intent is to set up a top notch affiliate program for the hotel-hunter site. Normally, I would assign all of these affilliates to the same class C. Question is: Since content would be largely identical, would this mean that they would all benefit from my PR? Or - if I've succeeded in increasing that PR by then - would it drag me down to the lowest common denominator. I did some checking using travelnow's affiliate program. Noticed that all different affiliates (same domain but different id) have same page rank for any given page, even the newest ones. So this suggests each one is "elevated" to page rank of parent site, rather than vice versa.
Page Rank passes through to internal links on your page. If you are talking about sub-domains, or the same domain, PR will pass. If you are talking about different domain names, you could have problems. PR is not the key to ranking well - good links to your site combined with good onpage SEO is. You can still have a high PR, but get hit with a duplicate content penalty that can prevent all but of one of the sites from having a good ranking. If a site gets hit with a duplicate content penalty, that site is unlikely to receive any meaningfull traffic from natural a search. IMO, PR has the most value for exchanging links with other relevant sites. Some webmasters who have an authority site won't link to a PR0 site. The higher your sites PR, the more likely you are to get people willing to exchange "quality" links with you.