Does IP change influence ranking?

[cangoou]

Hello! I got my best links from one person which had all his domains on one IP-Address. Since he liked my theme and style, he linked to me, and what happend was that I raised from about position 40 to the top 10 on several keywords in july and stayed there. I can very clearly connect his linking to the rise in the SERPs.

Now, I am falling again. The first drop was middle of december to about 50, now I'm almost back to 120. I ask this person and he says that he's experiencing this too on other domains he is linking, and that he has changed the IP-Adresses of his domains to different ones.

Could this be the problem?

The thing is: My domain ranked on one keyword very good before - and still does which is not linked from his domains at all. So only keywords that are linked from his domains are affected in the drop, so I exclude any penalties for my domain.

Any ideas about that? What can I do? Should I beg him to remove my links?

[Receptional Andy]

I don't think getting links removed is a worthwhile option, since if anything, Google is likely to discount links it doesn't like for whatever reason - a lack of positive effect, not a negative one.

It's likely that links from the same IP "neighbourhoods" may not count as much, and there may be "bad" IPs as far as Google is concerned, but I don't believe I've seen any effects like you describe as a result of IP addresses. It could be that his links are just not valued like there were previously, but for some other reason.

[cangoou]

Thanks for your reply.

I heard of something called "bad neighbourhood", so that links can have a negative effect - is there a way to check if the links from him trigger some "bad neighbourhood"-filter perhaps?

[janharders]

no, "bad neighbourhood" would be you linking to a site google considers "bad".

[cangoou]

Ah sorry, I mixed that up. So what would you suggest?

[Gemini23]

For what it is worth, I would work hard on getting good quality links from other sources. Although, having been bounced around by Google for a year or so I would think there are more reasons for this drop in rankings. Although two of the factors are good quality incoming links and most importantly good content. Are the 'good' links of the same topic or subject area as your website? Could there be adult related content on them?

[cangoou]

It's almost the same topic, and the keys are not very hard at all, so a handfull of good links are enough to be on the 1st page.

I guess I can try to get another handfull of links again. I was just wondering for the timly coincidence of the change of the IPs, if Google perhaps resets the age of a link on a new IP, because it (perhaps) thinks thats a indication for a new owner.

If perhaps someone else has suffered a drop because of the change of IPs or perhaps the WHOIS-data of his incoming links - but it seems that this is not the case here.

[jimbeetle]

So only keywords that are linked from his domains are affected in the drop

Keep in mind that the linking isn't isolated to your site and his sites, it ripples throughout the web. If, as you say, you can pinpoint the rise of those keywords in the SERPs to the links from his site, then possibly some backlinks to his site have somehow been downgraded, leading to less PR to be passed to yours. These can either be direct links to his sites or links somewhere in the upstream that affect the links to his sites.

As Gemini23 says, get quality links from other sources to minimize the impact if link juice from one source is nuked.