We used to speak of too many links from same C block as bad, have CDN's like CloudFlare made that concept irrelevant?

[RobertFisher]

Over lunch with our head of development, we were discussing the way CloudFlare and other CDN's help prevent DDOS attacks, etc. and I began to wonder about the IP address vs. the reverse proxy IP address. Before we would look to see commonalities in the IP as a way that search engines would modify the value to given links and most link software showed this. For ahrefs, I know they still show common IPs using the C block as the reference point. I began to get curious about what was the real IP when our head of dev said, that is the IP from CloudFlare... So, I ran a site in ahrefs and we got an older site we had developed years ago that showed up as follows: Actos-lawsuit.org 104.28.13.57 and again as 104.28.12.57 (duplicate C block is first three sets of numbers are the same and obviously, this has a .12 and a .13 so not duplicate.)

Then we looked at our host to see what was the IP shown there: 104.239.226.120. So, this really begs a question of is C Block data or even IP address data still relevant with regard to links? What do the search engines see when they look for IP address now?

Yes, I have an opinion, but would love to hear yours first!

[RobertFisher]

Excellent. Thanks

[GlobeRunner]

Here is one: http://www.crimeflare.com/cfs.html there are others out there if you search for them

[RobertFisher]

Can you give me the name of any of the tools? Thanks

[GlobeRunner]

There are tools that allow you to find out the "real" IP address of a server that's using Cloudflare. I just looked up a few using some of these tools, and they still work--so I'm assuming that Google will have the same access or ability to see these, as well.

So, your theory of using Cloudflare to not have to worry about class C blocks anymore when linking is good, but I wouldn't count on it.