Re: Google Pagerank and "Class-C Addresses"

[William Pitcock <nenolod () systeminplace net>]

On Mon, 2009-09-21 at 18:18 +0200, Sebastian Wiesinger wrote:
> Hello Nanog,
>
> I'm looking into a weird request which more and more customers have.
> They want "different Class C addresses", by which they mean IPs in
> different /24 subnets.
>
> The apparent reason for this is that Google will rank links from
> different /24 higher then links from the same /24. So it's a SEO
> thingy.

They are wrong.  Unfortunately, this is a rumour that is being cashed in
greatly by companies like GotWebHost.com, which offer "SEO hosting".
They may honestly believe that this is true, it is not.  Infact, IPs
have nothing to do at all, with PageRank, and don't let any of these SEO
crackheads tell you otherwise.

A google employee blogged about this topic at: 
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/myth-busting-virtual-hosts-vs-dedicated-ip-addresses/

> I googled a bit and found pages after pages of FUD and such great
> things as the "Class C Checker":  "This free Class C Checker tool
> allows you to check if some sites are hosted on the same Class C IP
> Range."
>
> My question is: Is there any proof that Google does differentiate
> between /24s, or even better is there any proof that this isn't the
> case? I will not give a customer space from different address blocks
> just because he read it in a SEO magazine.

As said above: No, it is not true.  Further, SEO is mostly a load of
bullshit that only delivers temporary results, as the search engines
will change their algorithms, etcetera.

> Perhaps someone from Google itself can answer this question?
>
> Also how do you handle such requests? I expect I'm not the only one
> who gets them.

It depends on how much money they pay me.

If they pay me a lot of money, then I will likely give them what they
want.  If not, well, that's too bad for them.

It doesn't matter to me, regardless, provided that they aren't violating
my AUP by you know, spamming or something along those lines.  In those
cases, well, they probably wouldn't be asking for more IPs, because they
would be offline.

William
-- 
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