Originally Posted by Jdoughs

You don't even have to go to that extent unless you are a sloppy linker or intend on doing lots of crosslinking within your IP ranges.

Your IP has about as much importance as your meta tags, or your internal links, your domain age, or your content, etc. Its just one part of many in the algorythym. While you need to pay attention to it, its less important then most people think. And far less important then alot of hosts or "experts" will lead you to beleive.

Its about the whole package and the web surrounding the page. There is thousands of sites out there that prove that several pages can rank on the same IP with differant search terms for diferant pages. Blogspot, thumblogger, youtube, facebook are many examples of sites that do so.

There is way more important things to learn and worry about then what classes your IP's are on, and where the nameservers point. A fresh site with a proper SEO strategy that is built on a IP that 1000 other sites are also on will still rank in the search engines. As long as it isnt so heavily crosslinked from the same nest of sites that its blatently obvious that its spam.

In my experience, IP only becomes a ranking factor as a check. You could say it "checks" the IP against internal and external links, if it reaches a certain threshold then it could be deamed as "the same nest" and spam.

Originally Posted by baddog

Bruce Clay (http://www.bruceclay.com) observed that although only 3 percent of websites are on dedicated IPs, well over 90 percent of the top-50 results in the search engines are sites having dedicated IP numbers. They confirmed this by moving a site from a shared IP to a dedicated IP and noticed "significant ranking increases.?