Is it too late to change an IP from the linking c-block?

[sanchez1960]

My main web development company is linked to many of our clients and our clients link back to us using footer links back.  We obviously have a high volume of c-block relations.

If I change my main site's location to a different server will it make any difference or is it too late?

[RyanKent]

There is a lot of speculation regarding how Google evaluates links and determines relationships between a linking site and its target. If you are a web developer and your clients are hosted on one of your servers, I would not make any effort to hide the relationship.

The prevailing thought amongst SEOs is Google understands IPs and therefore its important to not only change the IP address, but to ensure the new IP uses a different C block. This concept is years old and was employed as a first-step measure when Google first tackled the issue of site owners who were manipulating links. I strongly believe Google evolved past the linking C-block idea a long time ago.

Google is a very intelligent and experienced company when it comes to evaluating manipulative links. Here are a few examples of how Google can still determine a relationship exists despite varying your C-block:

• when all your clients are hosted on the same server, and they all provide links to your site, the relationship is pretty obvious.

• Google can ignore the IP addresses entirely and examine the nameservers. Many site owners use "SEO hosting" where they have one server with various IPs. The site owner specifically requests their IPs to use various C-blocks thinking Google wont recognize they are all using the same nameserver.

• there are numerous other ways Google can relate sites. A specific combination of software is one example. Perhaps all the sites you develop are Joomla 1.7 with a certain combination of extensions. Perhaps you install a specific custom-created script or widget.

The bottom line is footer links are the least valuable type of link. You can expect Google to recognize the link and offer it some minimal value. There is not likely any significant improvement to the link's value by varying the IP. If you desire more traffic I would suggest creating code to solve a problem no one else has tackled. You can then earn authentic links from a variety of sources and be far ahead of the game.

[ShaMenz]

Hi sanchez1960

Ryan is absolutely correct.

There are many more ways for Google to recognize the relationship between sites - especially given that the aim is for Googlebot to crawl every page you want accessible on each site. The classic tie between sites is the use of commonly named css files.

I get a sense that your question comes from a concern that the footer links may bring some negative effect upon your site. This is unlikely if you are simply placing a single link in the page footer. Spamming hundreds of links with exact match anchor text in the footer might be a different matter!

As Ryan explained, the reality is that the links just won't provide extra "juice" for your domain.

Funnily enough, we web designers were placing footer links long before the world at large ever heard the terms "SEO" or "link juice". Obviously the reason is that they allow site visitors who are impressed by our work to find out more about us and perhaps engage us to work for them

In my view, this is still a good idea and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. In fact, I would rather a click to our site from a prospective customer who already loves our work than a click from a vaguely interested "SERP browser" any day.

If Google is smart enough to recognize the links between sites, it is also smart enough to know that linking back to a web designer's site makes good marketing sense. After all, it was not us who decided to make links the basic currency of web rankings

Hope that helps,

Sha

[wojkwasi]

Very nicely put