Of course they profited off of it, as a great many hosting companies do. Its money. If you want to buy more, who's gonna keep you from doing just that? No, it is not harmful. Please show me conclusive evidence that it is, or stop spreading bunk. There is a world of difference between duplicate content and sharing IP's. Google can see that difference. The IP does not matter at all, no matter what. Google simply does not care. ? ? ? This is completely counter to ARIN's RFC's on the subject, and I hardly think Google would advocate the opposite of those guidelines. Unless you have some type of hard evidence to the contrary, again, stop spreading this useless drivel.
Mia, Ok, I haven't got hard evidence. it's only my humble point of view based on my own experience and reasoning. Take it or leave it. Google employs a lot of parameters to improve serps. At least for me, a dedicated IP and an own SSL give a bit more reliabiility to a site. In any case the poster didn't ask about hard evidence. in fact only google has hard (and confidential) evidence about it. The way that you're fussing makes me think that you have a lot of knowledge about it. Thank you for enlighting us and for sharing a lot of hard evidence holding up your point of view.
Its important for site owners to submit their site to quality directories and NICHE is what helps the site to get rankings. Different C Class IPs is an old theory, backlinks are backlinks once they are from different domains or sites. Quality and niche is what is important according to my experience.
No, quite the contrary as many of pointed out, Google says the opposite about it. Its more about logic, then knowledge. If Google really discounted the value of a site based on its NETBLOCK, then there would be hoards of collateral damage. The collateral damage would be caused by multiple SEO's all hosting at similar providers with similar NETBLOCKs, and perhaps, while not even remotely related to one another. Also, lets say you get several different IP's from multiple class C's, but they are all still in the same class C, B, or A, NETBLOCK. Where does Google stop? At the individual IP, the 1st octet, the 2nd octet, the third? Where? Its just inconceivable to me that this would be the case given the mass amounts of collateral damage that would occur given Google would have to employ some pretty manual methods to determine if these sites were even owned by the same webmaster, regardless of what IP they are hosted on. I doubt very much too that Google cares about an SSL, given that a great many people will use a single processing gateway, yet are not at all related to the others that may be using that same gateway that shares a similiar SSL. On the subject of SSL btw, it is one of the VERY FEW reasons to have a dedicated IP. Anything else is purely waste and in violation of ARIN policy here: http://www.arin.net/policy/nrpm.html#four33 Anyway, think about this for a second. If google is so smart and employs so many algos, would they not be able to determine the sole owner of a given network of sites regardless of the IP each is located on? There are other things that sites share in common. A common registar. A common set of code. A common set of links. A common set of name/address, etc., listed with either domains and or certificates.
If you have multiple directories that are interlinking each other, then your directories need to have unrelated IP addresses (deferent C-Class IP's). If they don’t, creating multiple sites that have similar keyword structures and link to each other will most certainly cause the Google spiders to be suspicious.
How so? multiple directories that are interlinking to each other get hit regardless of whether they share similar IPs or not. Its the linking that is at issue, not the IP and or host. Care to elaborate? This is a pretty vague post. What other purposes is it "not recommended for"?
If it is so "obvious", can you explain why? What makes it "obvious". Instead of just claiming it is, please support that claim? What evidence do you have that it does?