Thanks for the excellent insights on IP addresses and linking strategies.
It is a bit confusing if you try to understand the IP address numbers and which are A’s or B’s or C’s etc. so just keeping the simple concept of spreading the linking around to different host is easy to understand.

Thanks again

For people trying to get links from different IPs, they should create a link wheel. This would help them to rank for low competitive niches.

As usual, you provide good content in easy-to-understand terminology to your readers.

In theory, Google can’t give your site a bad ranking based on links from bad neighbourhoods… because it could be used by unethical companies to blacklist their competitors.

What do you think?

Neil.

End of the day, i think what Tavis mentioned is true: High quality links is the way to go !

Regardless of the specifics – the basic gist is – be careful about having too many links come from the same places! It’s the excessive activity that will be problematic. A few links from the same IP or class or subnet is usually not a problem – it’s when ALL or MOST of your links come from the same places that it raises suspicion and a penalty or worse may occur :’>

“EVERY IP ADDRESS has class A, B, C and D – all of them.”

This is NOT correct. Every IP address is EITHER a class A, B, C, or D. It can only be ONE of them, not ALL of them… What you are trying to say is every IP address has 4 separate octets which make up the address – ie, you will not see a 192.1.5 – it is missing the fourth octet.

IP address classification is NOT as you have shown in your example:

“208.109.181.174
that is an IP address
here are the classes in that IP – class a, b, c and d:
A 208
B 109
C 181
D 174″

the four separate octets that make up an IP address are not “classes” as you mentioned . The “class” of an IP is defined only by the first octet:

Specifically the ranges are:
a Class ‘A’ IP address is always 1 to 127.x.x.x
a Class ‘B’ IP address is always 128 to 191.x.x.x
a class ‘C’ IP address is always 192 to 223.x.x.x
a class ‘D’ IP address is always 224 to 247.x.x.x
finally, a class ‘E’ address which was omitted is always 228-255.x.x.x

So in effect, your example is in fact a Class C IP address since it starts with 208.

The other examples you show are NOT the classes you mentioned.

“these are diffenet class B IP’s
208.108.181.122
and
208.111.181.122″

Actually, no, these are not Class B IP address at all – they are still class C ip addresses. What you are trying to say is these class C addresses are on different subnets. The same applies on your next example of a “class A” ip address. One of them is indeed a class A IP address, but the second is still a class C.

Lastly, although the upper limit of any octet in an IP address can vary, you will never see a .999. In your example, the fourth octet of a class C IP address can only go up to 255. There’s no such thing as a .999 address nor can a number higher than .255 appear in any of the octets.

Again, the essence of your post is absolutely correct, linking excessively to and from multiple websites hosted on the same subnet is a huge no no, regardless of class. The more unique and varied the classes are (which by default would be completely different hosting providers), the less likelihood of these servers being owned by the same person to do “unscrupulous” linking. If you were living in a small city with one or two main hosting provider, it is very possible that two completely different companies in completely different markets could be hosted on the same class of IP – and if they linked to each other for legitimate purposes (ie, they were part of a local business directory), Google may look on that unfavorably.

In any case, moral of the story is, if you own multiple websites and are hosting them on the same hosting provider, don’t link to each other

hope this was helpful and coming from a network engineering background, I had to point out the errors

cheers
Tavis

http://www.ironmarketer.com

Up to 2 links in the comment are OK as long as they are not spammy!