A competitor of mine has approximately 5 sites in different specializations of the same overall niche that are on different class c ips, different nameservers, all linked to each other. Seems like all the other backlinks he has are s**t. How important is this? Should I be building microniche domain sites on different class c ips/nameservers to out link him? My niche is fairly difficult to find organic backlinks from others in because the market is fairly small, and all the strong domains are ran by large companies/government.
If they share anything IP related Google wil penalise your site, so it is essential for SEO to have seperate everything.
Make all your links look natural and make sure that you have a wide variety of links from different domains and servers. Only the would those links have some value and add to the authenticity of your own sites. Make sure that the content that links back to you is unique.