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You may have heard about the significance of IP addresses on many internet marketing forums and not understood exactly what all the fuss was about. Why the bother about a number that identifies where your computer is coming from, and a great deal of other information about it?
The reason many marketers pay close attention to this subject, and perhaps why you now will, lies in the realm of privacy and attempting to skirt the rules a bit.
Let’s take a quick look at what IP addresses are first, and then examine why marketers are careful when using them.
An IP address is simply a number that signifies host identification as well as the physical location of your computer, or the network it resides on. This information can be useful in several ways. Since most hosting companies consider these numbers “anonymous”, they generally aren’t readily available to help detect who you are. A bit more sleuthing would be in order for a task like that.
Now, where many marketers run afoul of the system is when they attempt to game the search engines, or other sites that insist on one account per user. An example would be eBay. Another would be several of the social bookmarking sites, like Digg and Propeller, who have voting mechanisms in place that can seriously send a popular site that’s getting many votes to the top of the organic search results. The opportunities for gaming their systems are simply too great, and thus these services make it their business to ban any IP addresses that attempt this sort of manipulation.
The ways marketers accomplish this is by using these services to either drop links to their sites in the social bookmarking or networking sites, so as to artificially inflate the popularity of their sites, or by enlisting software to do it for them. Many of these sites, in particular Digg, have gotten very good at ferreting out these schemes, and actively ban any IP address caught participating in this sort of activity, without any recourse or second chances.
This doesn’t stop all of them as it’s still far too easy to engage help from all over the world, (all on different IP addresses of course) to do their dirty work for them.
A little less “black hat” (more gray) reason why a webmaster might want to make sure his site has a unique IP address is when they are attempting to construct a mini-net of sites to promote their main site. In this case they wouldn’t want the search engines to be able to identify these “feeder” sites as belonging or having any connection to the “money” site, and thus possibly discounting the links or disrupting the network.
They can accomplish this easily by utilizing different web hosts with unique class C IP addresses. You can find schemes like this all over the Web.
If this is something that is important to you, just know that you need to tread carefully, and that sometimes despite your best efforts, discovery is made and complications arise. Then it’s back to square one!
