As SEOs, why do we spread our link networks far and wide across the internet?
Simple:
We don't want search engines or link crawlers to suspect that these sites might all be owned or operated by the same organisation.
The old way to do this was to buy space on as many different machines as possible across the web. This could be effective, but also brought its own problems such as:
- Expense: you either needed to skimp on quality or pay through the nose for diversity
- Organisation: Tracking passwords, nameservers and site statuses across so many hosts lead to hellish spreadsheets
- Reliability: If you couldn't go premium all the way chances were your rankings bounced up and down as the lights went on and off at your blog network's host
- Predictability: If you were buying the same cheap hosting deals as every other tom dick + harry SEO, the individual Ips betrayed you: if every other site on a server is clearly part of a private blog network, why wouldn't your domain be one too?
Just imagine: What if you went to all that time and expense to hide your intentions, only for your neighbours to turn you in?
So why shift to a CDN?
By using a CDN we take a totally different approach. Instead of using a single, static IP address, why not host your site on hundreds of thousands of Ips at once?
Instead of sharing with 100-200 low quality, unloved PBN domains or equally unimportant websites, why not share with over 3 million high quality, big brand sites - a crowd so big, you can't help but get lost in it?
And given Google's emphasis on site speed, should they put more trust in a hacked WP install on a creaking server that can't render a page in under 10 seconds, or on a super-fast static site that is delivered from the CDN in 50ms or less?
When you host your sites with us, your sites shapeshift, never staying in the same place at once. Whether your PBN is on seperate Class A, B or C IPs becomes irrelevant as the IP addresses you get vary based on time of day, network load and crucially, the visitors' location. So an Aussie would see Australian IP addresses, a Texan would get an IP from Austin, and a German an IP from Frankfurt.
By being everywhere at once - just like the millions of other legitimate sites on the CDN - it makes it nigh impossible to use hosting location or IP address to tie sites together by owner. You can stop worrying about your hosting footprints and spend more time eradicating the others.