Within half an hour I’d secured the domain, set up their hosting and designed a very quick logo and set it up on their holding page. I called the client back and that was that.

On Saturday morning, a little over 24 hours since I had initially spoken with the client, I was passing their shop in North Camp, Farnborough. I decided to stop and grab a photograph of the shopfront and was more than little surprised to see that the new shop had already been signwritten AND the web address was on the shopfront too! Talk about being quick!

It would have been better if they’d waited to get their sign written because my own 5 minute logo was better than the one their sign writer provided plus mine was better kerned too Also I couldn’t identify the fonts they’d used, even Identifont was no help (for the first time ever).

I raced back to the studio, dropped the original logo and knocked up another quick holding page for the client. So here we have, a little earlier than expected, a site for Simply Carpets and Flooring. Sure, it’s a bit 1999 for the moment but, bear in mind, it is a holding page and it had to be up quick. Besides, what else can you do when the client is so quick to get their web address up on their shopfront?

What’s the crack with this and what the hell does SEO have to do with hosting?

Well, certain search engines, that we won’t mention, look at the IP address of where sites are hosted and factors this into their ranking algorithm. What they specifically look at is the class C IP address, so for this site with the current IP address 70.85.48.84 the class C IP is 70.85.48.

If the search engines see links between any of these class C IP addresses then the links are quite simply devalued. I once knew a guy in the US who, many years ago, hooked onto the fact that links boost sites and created something like over 300 sites with virtually no content, all linking to eachother.

Now, the SEs aren’t daft so they introduced this cross-linking detection which stops someone setting up hosting on a reseller package and creating tons of sites that all link to eachother.

That’s bad news if you’re legitimately building sites on the cheap and you find genuine value of linking to other sites, especially if they’re in the same arena e.g. you link one Automotive site to another, or you’re a designer hosting your clients’ sites on your reseller account, pointing to them from your portfolio and having them point back to you.

It’s good news if you’re a hosting company because to avoid class C IP penalties you’d have to spread your sites over different servers far apart, at different companies etc. For the small fish inthis big pond, that can be quite a pricey problem.

That’s where SEO Hosting comes in: SEOHosting.com from Hostgator specifically has a number of class C IP addresses where you can avoid these penalties… for now

So, from an SEO point of view you can optimise, promote, build links and not worry (too much) about Class C IP penalties.