There is a lot of speculation that search engines like Google will check the Who Is information for all websites to see who owns the domain name. If they do, this can be an issue for people that own multiple domains and link to each of them to boost SEO or search engine optimization rankings. This is a huge NO-NO for google as its against their quality guidelines. You can also purchase a Who IS block so that no one including the search engines can find out who the owner is, but there is also speculation that Google can find this information.
Whether Google is actually checking up on the WHO IS information or not, they most likely do document the IP addresses of each site so its a good idea to find different hosting IP’s for each site if you participate in this gray/black hat SEO linking practice. A standard “Rule of Thumb” in the SEO world is to make sure each site has a different Class C IP address.
I just contacted the web hosting service HostGator to confirm, and if you get a plan that can host more than one domain, the IP addresses will be the same.
But if you purchase a whole new plan with one hosted domain, you will most likely get a different IP address. So I hope this helps someone out.
