JoebeeKenobi

True to a point. Google are trying to avoid people manipulating the search results by simply setting up a load of their own sites and linking them together. Google sees a relevant link as a 'vote' for another site. You wouldn't get an accurate poll for say a new product if you were the one putting all the votes in as you are bound to vote for your product. A true poll gets 3rd parties to vote for whether they think a product is good or not. Thats all Google is trying to achieve here so on that basis its not really unfair... they are in the business of presenting unbiased search results as much as possible...

It seems that this would unfairly penalize many innocent people that use shared hosting at Godaddy and others. --assuming I am getting the right message here....


Thank you for the explanation! - Nice of you to help one on one.

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As you may know, links from one website to another can help to push up your ranking with google and other search engines. Because it is easy for one person to setup many sites on a single server and potentially link them together, Google and other search engines devalue links that are found to be from sites hosted on the same server or C class IP.

'C class' is basically servers that appear to be in the same server network. So often one hosting company will have only a single 'C class' as they are give a block of IP addresses for their servers.

So, for best benefit of linking and if you have several sites you wish to link together, you are best to host each site with completely different web hosting companies and ensure the IP addresses have different C classes. The C class relates to the 3rd group of digits in the IP address:-

123.123.123.1 and 123.123.123.2 are in the same C-class but different servers
123.123.123.1 and 123.123.124.1 is in two different C-classes

Hope that helps.

Hi, what does this mean? "same server or C class"
.........
Thanks! :)