We get clients from time to time wanting big ip ranges for SEO purposes. The last year or two I have pretty much told people this cannot work anymore and that google surely would have caught on to that. I have had some SEO experts tell me that it can help sometimes but if it is the same content spread out across multiple ips you can actually get penalized and it has no effect. What are your thoughts on this?
It always was a myth. People misguidedly thought it was a way to hide a footprint. It's another one of the stupid obsessions by SE manipulators (for want of a better/politer word). If there's an obvious footprint then it won't matter how far apart the IPs are. It was a great myth to play on and market a product, though, for people who knew better (such as running "SEO hosting", blog networks, etc). Do some research on Panda and duplicate content. Look up what happened to sites that carried a lot of duplicate/spun (therefore similar) content. Next, use some common sense. What was the result of this and other manipulations? At best, they got ignored (i.e. no value), otherwise it's a manual penalty or algorithmic demotion (at this time, getting hit by Penguin is probably worse than a manual penalty due to its infrequency).
It should look natural, if you are using multiple IP address for link building purposes and getting one link each IP address it won't help much, it should be natural, on some IP address, you may get more than one link, this way you can show that you are building natural links..IP address is still counted.
Good answer, thats what I thought. And on link building I dont think they check ip address, they would do it by domain/hostname, maybe some ips will get crawled but I would bet they guage backlinks by linking domains.
Your backlinks need to be from different class C IP addresses, if most links come for similar IP addresses this raises a red flag to Google
Webmasters own a server and they keep their websites on same server because it is much easier to upkeep one server than 25 shared hosting accounts. On many occasions these sites will interlink because they are similar to each other and because will like to promote our own products. Google knows this and I assume that this should not be a problem in future SEO.
Let's see your evidence then please? And, oh really please, how do you explain how I can blanket page 1 results with multiple sites on the same host for the same searchy term then? A fluke each and every time I do so perhaps, I think not...
Do all your sites on page 1 have backlinks from the same class C or do they have a diverse link profiles?
What has that to do wiht my question to you? It makes no odds to my thing! That's not the point though as ryan-uk pointed out it's mostly a myth and for those doing dodgy things. Do you have evidence to support your words was my question?
Sorry, Revelations-Decoder, I don't have any "evidence" to support my statement. I have not seen any evidence to prove otherwise though. This statement is just my opinion which is also held by others. I think we can all agree that Google likes to see a "natural" backlink profile, so it would stand to reason that Google would expect backlinks to come from a variety of different IP addresses. Whether Google actually checks this as part of the algo or not I don't know, but I believe if they don't it could well be possible in the future. Oh, and I can't "explain how you can blanket page 1 results with multiple sites on the same host for the same searchy term" without a few more details. We will just have to take your word for it. PLEASE NOTE: All my posts on this forum reflect my opinion based on over 10 years experience of doing SEO and running a successful SEO business with many satisfied clients.
I think opposite. They do take some notice on Ips, but they will do less in future because it makes no sense to discriminate websites based on their IP.
Exactly, and Google has stated this on a few occasions, too. (Check Cutts' blog, where he quotes someone else from Google, and also one of the videos he made for the Webmaster channel on YouTube.) Less time should be spent worry about idiotic little details such as IP addresses and more focus on the audience and what they want (I'm sure they couldn't give a flying monkeypoo about IP addresses).
IPs can raise red flags at Google. Interlinking multiple web sites from the same Class C IP block can raise flags. Interlinking multiple sites from multiple Class C IP blocks can raise flags as this is what blog networks typically do. It pretty much comes down to interlinking of sites. You can have 100 web sites on the same IP (such as a shared hosting account) with no problem. Interlink those same 100 sites and bad things can happen.
You are missing the first and most obvious point behind these blog networks. Whether they interlinked or not, they could have been on diversely different IPs and never linked to each other. The service they were selling in itself was a gigantic and obvious footprint (bigger than King Kong's). I'm sure all those Tumblr blogs linking to each other (due to reblogging) is a gigantic red flag and Google will soon be banning them (!).
I said "can raise flags"... I didn't say, "always lead to filtering or a penalty." There is a BIG difference. Google knows about major sites like Tumblr where interlinking might be natural.
If you are using multiple domains to set up a network for linking to your money site then YES, absolutely they should be on multiple c-class IP addresses AND with private domain registration. I had a client get nailed just a few months back because he decided to set up WP blogs a few of the "extra" domains that he had in his Godaddy account and linked them to his money site. He had been ranking on the first page for a pretty competitive term for years and all of a sudden he was all the way back on page 52. PS. His site still hasn't recovered even after I removed the blogs. I just ended up setting him up a new site and ranking it instead. I don't know about you, but that's proof enough for me.
It's not really conceivable that Google is going to spend time studying every linking that's similar by IP. There are valid reasons for it to happen (and does happen). Wouldn't be reasonable to assume by default there is (or could be) something untoward. Such a "red flag" would be going off constantly. I can see it now: "Red flag alert! Matt Cutts to the similar-IPs-mobile."
Adding to this conversation late, but I would imagine that Google is able to identify when multiple Class C IPs are being used for a legitimate reason as opposed to just trying to game the system. It can be advantageous to have multiple IPs in different countries if you have an international market and are trying to rank in a specific region. This article gets into some of the reasoning. http://www.aseohosting.com/blog/2013/07/why-should-i-use-seo-hosting/