WHY SEO HOSTING IS UTTER BULLSHIT

Just one example of shady SEO industry practices

While you may suffer from SEO ailments, SEO hosting is not the cure.

“GET YOUR OWN, UNIQUE, C-CLASS IP TO IMPROVE YOUR RANKINGS!”

Sound familiar? Well I’m going to make one thing very clear here:

It’s absolute bullshit.

Now I’m not one to just state something as fact — especially when being “contrary” — so I’ll actually explain why, and how the term C-Class IP is being misused by the SEO industry as just another of what I call a BSBW (Bullshit Buzzword). Before we begin, though, let me explain very crudely what a C-Class IP actually is.

A Class C IP address — which, by the way, is the correct term — is essentially any IP address which exists within the range of 192.0.0.0–223.255.255.255. What does this have to do with SEO, and SEO hosting? Absolutely nothing. In fact, this way of approaching IP address allocation is now obsolete (since the early 90’s, no less) and has been replaced with what is known as Classless Inter-Domain Routing, which also has nothing to do with SEO, or SEO hosting. If you want to learn more about these concepts, a Google search for Classful Networks should produce some “light” reading for you. So what exactly are these SEO hosts talking about, then? Well luckily for them (or not) I’m here to clear the air for you!

I’ve always been a fan of Hanlon’s Law, ie.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

That said, this nonsense is so off the charts that it has officially broken my Crock ‘O Shite meter. Like most people with a modicum of tech-savviness, you likely know what an IP address is, and what it looks like. What the SEO hosting companies are doing here is conflating C BLOCK IPs with Class C IP addresses, which at best is horrendously disingenuous. To explain the differences between these two terms, I’ll be using a familiar IP address: 192.168.2.1.

While 192.168.2.1 is, in fact, a Class C IP address, what the SEO hosts are actually referring to when they intentionally use the term incorrectly, is the breakdown of IPs into “blocks,” meaning what they should be advertising is C Block IPs. Regardless, something, something, painting turds gold… So using the example IP above, the breakdown would look like this:

What these SEO hosts claim, is that through their service, you are able to host many websites in a shared/VPS hosting environment (think , but unlike regular hosting companies, they claim that by giving each of your properties a unique IP by altering the C Block (and by extension the D Block), that you can somehow trick Google et al. into thinking that they are, in fact, completely separate entities, owned/maintained by separate individuals, or organizations. Here is a rough example of how they claim to achieve this:

Without getting into the utter scumminess of PBNs, which contribute to what I call “The Problem” (more on that another time), this makes a rather bold assumption: Google, or other major search engines, are not capable of spotting these trends. For the record, Google possesses the largest webgraph currently in existence, so as far as I’m concerned this is complete bs. You will eventually be caught, and your de-ranking will soon follow. Enjoy.

Outside of geographical considerations, or blacklisted IPs (which are a relatively rare occurrence), IP addresses have practically no bearing on SEO; this is just another area where the industry preys on a lot of peoples misunderstanding of terminology, where a lot of people may not know the difference between an IP address, and a domain, the latter of which Google frequently blacklists, or de-ranks.

All-in-all, the takeaway here is that SEO Hosting is just another example of this particular industries proclivity for pushing snake oil. Due to being SEO conscious, a customer is likely to undertake a number of options to improve their SEO, and most (if not all) of the tangible benefits could be attributed to those changes, and not the scam that we know as SEO hosting.