Multiple links from same virtual IP

[More Traffic Please]

I sometimes get requests to do reciprocal links from a webmaster that has four or five sites virtually hosted on the same exact IP. In terms of PageRank transfer and anchor text, does Google look upon this in the same way it would four or five sites linking to me from completely different IP's? Or, will Google reduce the anchor text importance and or limit the amount of PR transfer because the links are all coming from the same IP?

[billygg]

thats a good question, im wonderin the same thing, seeing the company i work for hosts about 300 sites, and i have some of the sites linked together depending on if they are relavant with each other.

[dougmcc1]

I would have to say that it wouldn't matter if the links were coming from the same IP. I don't think it would be fair for an SE to say "only 4-5 sites per IP can count as a backlink for a single site". For instance, what if 4 sites from the same IP just happened to link to the same IP? I don't think an SE could justify only counting one of them.
Come to think of it, that would greatly affect the number of backlinks for big sites like Yahoo. Surely they get tens or hundreds of links from some IP's.

Now if the owner and whois information was the same for the sites with the same IP then I might suspect something fishy - maybe. But again, if all of the owner's sites on the same IP were related, then maybe it would make sense for the owner to link all his sites to a certain site. For example, what about subdomains? Many sites use subdomains and each one links back to the main site. Subdomains are considered as different sites, but they usually share the same IP and owner. I think this is a totally legitimate way of linking to one site from multiple sites that share the same IP and owner.

[ciml]

I'm very sure that for PageRank purposes, there's no difference.

I haven't decided if the anchor text boost is less if the link comes from a domain on the same IP; it is less if it comes from the same domain.