On Sep 21, 2009, at 2:01 PM, William Pitcock wrote:
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-add...
Yes, and I'll second this -- PageRank does not in any way get improved by hosting on multiple IPs (or different ranges or Class A's or Class- C's[0] or swamp space or space from different RIRs or "premium addresses" (?!) or anything like that...).
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?
There's Matt's word and Craig Silverstein's word and (not that it count for as much) my word -- PageRank does NOT differentiate between / 24's. Google has stated this multiple times and we have nothing to gain by lying or making things up -- the SEO folks on the other hand have a large incentive to claim that IPs *do* make a difference as they sell this as a service... W [0]: Yes, yes, I know, settle down....
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 -- William Pitcock SystemInPlace - Simple Hosting Solutions 1-866-519-6149 http://www.systeminplace.net/ Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/systeminplace
-- No man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft. --Anon.