What is SEO Hosting?
These days as SEO companies build up resources of good relevant websites they need to make sure these websites are hosted in different locations. Why? Well let me first explain what a different location is. All websites have 2 addresses the first, which we all know is www.whatever however the one we are most interested here is made up of a serious of 4 numbers such as 654.54.79.90 (example) these are known as IP (Internet Protocol) addresses.
Many years ago SEO companies would build one big website as a resource and then build many sister websites which would all interlink and come from the same IP. This was back in the day when Google’s algorithm hadn’t been developed to the extent it has today and these SEO companies were able to build links for their clients and move them up in the search engines rankings. These days’ Google, Yahoo, Bing and others have become aware of the flaw in their search algorithms and so if they find many links coming from websites which are all on the same IP they will consider them a link farm and so, at the very least ignore them and at the very worse band the website which has these links pointing to them
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For this reason c-class hosting was given as an alternative way for SEO and webmasters to host many websites on different addresses. C-class address is the first 3 numbers of the IP address such as 654.54.79 (from the example above). If you have all your websites hosted with different c-class addresses then this tells the search engines that these websites are not linked together and therefore you are able to build many links to your client’s websites without getting them thrown off the search engines. It is the perfect solution to being able to build up your resources as an SEO expert or webmaster without getting penalised or considered a link farm.
A Link Farm by definition is a group of websites that are either all on the same IP address or are all interlinked in some way. Here comes the warning! Do not interlink all your own websites as this will flag a warning to search engines that these websites are in some way related to each other. Having built a number of websites over the past year we never link any of those websites to each other and only build links from other websites as we consider the possibility of Google considering those website to be connected would then render all our work to be a mere Link Farm.
Now, some may say, ‘you’re cheating!’ Well, I say what we are doing alongside other work and link building is to create really good websites that are themed to our client’s sites and which take a huge amount of good content etc to benefit our clients. Remember building 100 different websites is a lot more work than building one big website with many sister sites linked to it.
One thing Google and other search engines frown upon is ‘paid links’ Google, however does not have a problem with you paying someone to build your links for you. If you do not have the time or energy/effort (understandable) to build your own links then it is perfectly acceptable for you to hire someone to do it for you.