In Search of Optimization

I’ve heard it a million times - inbound links from sites with a different Class C IP than yours have more weight. But what on earth are they talking about when they say Class C? When I first searched about the topic, I immediately got confused. My initial search brought me to this Wikipedia page. According to this page, IPs are divided as follows:

This confused me almost immediately because according to this table, my IP address (69.57.158.57) would be a class A IP. And since my concern was about SEO, the immediate question that came into my mind was, should I be looking for different Class A IPs for link partners instead of Class C IPs?

Once again I searched and came across multiple SEO forums which says that an IP is divided into the following sections - A.B.C.D. I’m getting somewhere, I thought. Obviously, the SEO definition of Class C is different form the technical definition. In the SEO definition, my IP will be divided as follows:

And when SEO people speak of a different “Class C IP,” they are actually referring to a different A.B.C section.

Ahh, ok, now that makes sense.  The good news is that as long as the site linking to you is hosted on a different server, then chances are the A.B.C section will be different than yours.

But, why do search engines check for this?  The answer is simple.  If they don’t then it would be pretty easy to raise a website’s PR by creating tons of websites that would link to the main website.  This is especially easy if you own your own dedicated server.

Are inbound links from the same Class C IP useless?  No, they just weigh less.  In other words, 1000 links from a different Class C IP is most likely to boost your Google Pagerank versus 1000 inbounds links from websites with the same Class C IP as your main website.

Ok, I hope I shed some light to the topic of Class C IPs and inbound links.

And yes, I won’t mind if you link to this webpage.