In the great Google infrastructure, I'm sure that Google knows what IP address your site is hosted on, and all the ones tied to it. In one of the past MOZ blog posts you can see a number of factors Google looks at to see what you control. We used dedicated IP's for each client, just in case anything ever happened to one account, it would not affect the others. They are close in IP address range, since they are on the same block, but none are on the same number. This isn't an attempt to gain SEO rank, as much as it is to protect the client.

Locally, I have reason to believe its a different story. For example, we are located in St Louis, and use a local server center located in downtown St Louis. After changing our site from hostgator under a shared IP, (Provo, Utah) to a local server center, we saw an drastic (in internet time) improvement in site load time, responsiveness, and believe it or not, a ranking boost....true story, no joke. It wasn't a large boost, but we moved up 2 spots on our main keyword on page one, and 1-2 in other places. We didn't make any other changes to the site, other than adding a few blog posts, and this was not around any major algorithm shift or update. We have seen this pattern repeat with other clients as well.

My guess is that Google liked the decreased load times, the local server location (as it matched the city on our site, somehow verifying our location further), and the fact that the site was on a dedicated IP address. If we had just changed the site's IP address by itself, I do not think we would have seen any impact or result change.

"there is really no SEO benefit of having a unique IP for each of your sites unless you're attempting to pass link juice between each, which falls into the greyhat category."

I don't think you would get away with this for very long, or that it would benefit you in any way. Google would see that you host or control these sites through your analytics account, or IP range. If you wanted to pull it off, and have separate analytics accounts, dedicated IP's etc, I doubt the result would be worth the time.

I dont think I would accept it. First, you have no idea of the history behind that domain. Could be that they spam the daylights out of people, or have a questionable backlink strategy. If their domain is compromised or gets in trouble in the future, it could hurt you.

Instead of posting your articles and content on someone else's site and building their page count and relevance, spend the time posting on your own. Get the backlinks you seek by submitting your articles and content to trusted sources, and get people to link to you. This can be time consuming and difficult, but ultimately much more rewarding. (both in pride and seo)

Best case scenerio, if they have a great domain history and its not spammy, I woud still look at the long term goal of building up your own content, on your site.

One of the things I noticed, is that the linking sites, even tho they are not related, and blog comment spam, have a high domain authority. I wonder if that plays a part in this at all.

Yes, I added it into OSE. That's actually where I found so many of them. You should see what is linking to this site, as it's truly scary. I would never want our domain to be a part of that. BUT, somehow it is working for them. Almost every link is something questionable, and not related at all. It's funny how Google will penalize hotvsnot and the like, but not this type of activity.

Happy Friday Mozzers!

I wanted to pick your brains this morning, and see what your thoughts were on how Google missed this one.

One of our competitors is ranking high in Google, and has been for some time. About 5-6 months ago, his site skyrocketed from page 3-4 to the top of page one. The site meta tag is pulling in logo alt text, content is very messy and sales driven, and after looking at the backlink profile in MOZ tools, it has a ton of links from China, Japan, Korea. Most of the backlinks are from blog pages, about everything under the sun, from UFO's to porn sites. This site has consistantly ranked high at the top of the page for many different competitive keywords. My question is this: HOW? After all the updates done by Google, and their focus on web spam, what is allowing this site to rank high constantly?  (5-6 months now, and often in the number one spot).

Here is an example of some of the backlinks. There are a LOT of them.

http://sundtjek-wp.alexandra.dk/?p=1
http://ice.anyang.ac.kr/xe/teacher/2095
http://blog.so-net.ne.jp/etsuko_hayashi_ET3/2006-07-02

Don't worry, we are not looking to follow in his footsteps, lol. I was just wondering how this can happen, and for such a long time period.

CON:
"if your video ranks, it will direct users to youtube, not your website - so there is limited SEO value from that perspective."

I agree with this. Having your traffic directed to YouTube doesnt really do your site or traffic any favors, BUT you can include links in the description and on the video overlays to combat this.

Vimeo Pro allows you to directly embed vidoes on your site, and not have the branded video player.

PRO:
Its free, and really easy to use/upload/delete/share/modify.
A lot of people use YouTube. Seriously. 
Google indexes YouTube videos in search result pages
Can overlay ads on your videos for extra revenue
Vimeo is $100 a year iirc.
Videos all under one account, and uses gmail account to manage/log in

To be honest, I don't think it makes a difference. I would focus on spending extra time on your video, to make it more "conversion-friendly". Spend more time on your message, and what you want to communicate to your viewer. That way, it wont matter where you host it, people will want to come see you.

I am in favor of keeping them. One rule we live for is "Not optimizing only for Google, yahoo or any one specific platform"

If the keywords are direct and well chosen, they will not hurt you. If not, its more than likely there are some other areas of your site that could use improvements as well. You never know how people will be getting to your site, or by what means they will get there. Removing something that is well structured, even if it's only used by a select few platforms is not a good idea IMHO.

If they are stuffed, then yes, it would be a good idea to revise them, but not completely remove them. Is the keywords tag the most important factor? No, not by any means. i would take a hard look at your description and page titles before I would suggest worrying about keywords.

A quote someone once told me about SEO "If my sink is leaking, I fix the leak. I don't throw away the whole sink, or go buy a new one, unless the old one cannot be repaired."