SEO hosting as a category is about as misunderstood as it gets, to the point that even companies that offer it often don’t know what they’re selling. In part, that confusion is manufactured with the intention of avoiding scrutiny by some hosting providers.
And among the topics that most people get wrong are the different classes of IPs, and the interplay between blocks, classes, and PBNs.
In this article, we’ll try to explain this simply so you can make informed decisions when you’re building your PBN.
What’s SEO Hosting?
SEO hosting is a somewhat outdated approach to hosting private site networks. For a long time, the most important metric for success for some hosting providers was profit.
And, the way to get the most profit was to set up their own nameservers and offer “diverse” IPs that were all hosted in the same place and in sequential IPs.
Frequently, these same providers stuffed their servers to the brim with low-quality sites effectively creating shady subnets that could easily be linked by examining their hosting at their hosting.
Once private networks started getting identified and deindexed more frequently, it became obvious that the SEO hosting approach didn’t do enough to hide private networks. Many PBN owners saw their entire networks crumble as a result of using cheap and negligent hosting.
New SEO hosting methods, or what we now know as PBN hosting, are far more careful to cover any footprints that may lead search engines to discover that a group of sites are under the control of a single webmaster.
What Are IP Classes and Blocks?
We touched on IP classes in the introduction but it deserves a little further explanation.
Much like C-class hosting, A-Class hosting often gets confused with A-block hosting.
IPv4 classification is a broad subject but all you really need to know is that each class of IPs A through E corresponds to a different range of IP numbers. And, each class can support a different number of hosts on a network with A supporting the most and C the fewest.
Each class leads to a corresponding block and the A-block can use the last three sets of numbers of an IP address to assign hosts, whereas the C-block can only assign hosts in the last set of numbers.
For instance:
- 63.100.121.124
- 63.100.121.125
Those two IPs are on the same C-block, 63.100.121. Now, take a look at these two:
- 122.135.200.91
- 122.233.18.59
Those two addresses are in the same A-block of IPs. There are way fewer networks in the A-block but each network can have a huge number of hosts.
Putting it All Together
So, now you know what A-class IPs are, and you know what SEO hosting is. But, what’s the connection?
Part of the way some SEO hosting providers cut costs is by offering cheap hosting on readily available C-class of hosts. But, by relying only on these cheap servers you end up in the same bad neighborhood as all the other sites that the provider is stuffing their servers with.
That’s one problem. Another problem is that having all the links to your money site coming from a single IP block is an obvious footprint that you want to avoid. And that’s just one piece of the footprint puzzle that old-school SEO hosting got wrong, nowadays there are many more things that expose PBNs to deindexing.
The solution to both of these problems is to work with a reputable hosting provider. A provider that can guarantee you a good mix of A-block, B-block, and C-block IP addresses and works with well-known hosting companies around the world.
In short, you need a hosting provider like Easy Blog Networks.
Conclusion: A-Class Hosting for SEO
IP classes and blocks are one of the many footprints that you will have to consider if you want to create and maintain a long-lived link network.
If you’re serious about running a private blog network, you should take the time to understand where your provider hosts your domains, how they’re providing a “diversity” of IPs, and who their DNS providers are.
Or, you can trust an experienced hosting provider like Easy Blog Networks to think about them for you.