Backlinks for the same IP address

[JonnytheB]

Hi Everyone

I've been doing a backlink clean up as my site has dropped quite a lot in the search engine results over the last 4 months. While doing the backlink clean up I cam e across 20 different domains all based in the Washington/ VA area all with the same IP address. To make matters worse the contents and link to my site are all duplicated. Is this seen as bad practice from Google's perspective i.e. a link network.??

I look forward to hearing you comments

Many thanks

Jonathan

[AndieF]

It's definitely not the end of the world. Google knows that this is often unavoidable, especially with hosted website services such as WordPress or Squarespace.

I don't think there's any evidence that Google punishes you from having too many links from one IP address. However, I'd argue that if you have 'too many' from one IP address it might suggest you're going after quantity of links over the quality.

Quality would probably be diverse, having a bunch of sites on one IP address is a signal that perhaps your links are.

[Dr-Pete]

I'd tend to agree - this used to be a bigger deal, but as IPv4 space runs low and more and more sites share IP addresses, Google has had to be more forgiving. I'm slightly concerned that the 20 domains are all duplicated, though - that could start to look like a link network. If it's just one site and you have a solid link profile, it's probably no big deal. In most cases, Google would just filter those links and they might even filter the domains (basically, they'd be ignored). If you're seeing this situation repeat itself, though, that's a different matter.