This is not true. It's been well documented that PageRank
uses a number of
metrics, probably the most important of them (in terms of
ranking) being the
number of links to a page or site (and I believe, the PageRank of the
pages/websites those links come from).One of my websites has consistently been in the top 10 or at
worst top 20
results when searching for the word "megapixel" despite the word only
appearing on the resulting page about 4 times - if it was
simply content
based there's no way that site would be ranked so highly.
Matt Cutts from Google has publicly stated this to not
be true; if it is true and he was lying, then everyone
hosted at a large provider would be penalized for doing
so from an SEO perspective since the likelihood of being
on a 'close' network to similar content would be high
when you've got hosts running hundreds of thousands
of name-based sites off one /24. Actually he stated this
to not be true in response to a thread I started on this
list about this subject several years ago when I was
complaining about Google causing IPv4 exhaustion due to
people asking hosts, with some willing, to give them a
bunch of IP's on different /24's for SEO purposes when there
is no technical justification for it. We've had customers
leave and go elsewhere after refusing to give them IP's
they didn't need because they were convinced by some
SEO 'expert' that they need a bunch of doorway sites on
a variety of /24's. If someone is willing to leave their
host over that, there are certainly going to be hosts
willing to dish up IP's for SEO reasons, and the waste of
addresses continues.
David
