Understanding SEO is vital to anyone who wants to use a web presence to generate business. Things are not made easier by the fact that what is important in SEO changes from time to time as Google adjusts the way it ranks websites – the famous Google algorithms.
Anyone seeking to earn money from their website needs to get the site’s ranking as high as possible. Ways to do this fall out of favour and become worthless as the algorithms change. Till now, where the site was actually hosted has been ignored but a new breed of hosting companies is now emerging under the name of SEO hosts.
Picture a company using a firm to make sure that, when anyone searches for someone who does what they do, their name appears on the first page of search results. Now picture five hundred companies in the same line of business using the same firm and employing the same techniques. They can’t – won’t – all appear on the first page. Many will be so far down the list that the searcher doesn’t look at their site at all.
SEO hosting offers a solution to this problem by having the site hosted on servers that are themselves search engine optimised.
The key to this is backlinks – other sites that point to the site whose ranking is under consideration. The aim should be to have as many backlinks as possible because more backlinks means more frequent finding by search engines.
Google, of course, knows all about this and those algorithms that everyone talks about examine the nature of the backlinks pointing to a site. If Google doesn’t like the way they are set up, the search engine ranking will be downgraded. In extreme cases, Google may even remove the site from its results so that no-one ever sees it. Something Google and the other search engines have become very good at in recent months is detecting backlinks that exist in numbers but are all created by the same entity. Google doesn’t like that because it understands that those backlinks are there to give a false impression of popularity and it penalises the site.
A “blog farm” is a network of interlinking websites created to raise the main website’s ranking through a lot of backlinks. This used to work well; now Google has rumbled it and it can be the kiss of death.
The problem with a blog farm is that all of the interlinking sites have Class C IP addresses which look very similar because they are all based on one single Class C IP address and Google spots that immediately. What is therefore needed is to have the backlinks coming from Class C IP addresses that look different because they ARE different.
So now there’s a new kind of blog farm: one run by an SEO hosting service using multiple devices with multiple Class C IP addresses and providing a large number of backlinks not detectable by search engines like Google as being supplied by, essentially, the same service. Whether this will continue to evade Google’s attention, and for how long, no-one can say – but for the moment, any webmaster wanting to maximise search engine ranking must take a close look at SEO hosting with multiple Class C IP addresses.