Matt Cutts, who works for Google, has iterated over and over that this is absolutely, positively, not the case and does not help page rank: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/myth-busting-virtual-hosts-vs-dedicated-ip-add... So there's an answer from someone at Google. How do I answer such requests? I tell them they if they want to waste their money, that's what this service is for: http://www.seohosting.com/ Regards, Mike Gazzerro www.ubiquityservers.com 866-438-8247 x 500 -----Original Message----- From: Sebastian Wiesinger [mailto:nanog@ml.karotte.org] Sent: Monday, September 21, 2009 11:18 AM To: NANOG Subject: Google Pagerank and "Class-C Addresses" 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. 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. 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. Regards, Sebastian -- New GPG Key: 0x93A0B9CE (F4F6 B1A3 866B 26E9 450A 9D82 58A2 D94A 93A0 B9CE) Old GPG Key-ID: 0x76B79F20 (0x1B6034F476B79F20) 'Are you Death?' ... IT'S THE SCYTHE, ISN'T IT? PEOPLE ALWAYS NOTICE THE SCYTHE. -- Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant