The Class C issue is a common one. While noone really knows how G operates, from my experience, multiple (reasonably) interlinked sites on the same IP (diff domains) did not get penalized in the past.
However, without outside links pointing to your cluster, you should not expect much popularity.
It is important to have legitimate quality links to your sites from others (outside your realm) - otherwise, you're just a small group of 'islands'.
In the past, who points to you generally did nothing or something when it came to boosting your ranks.
Now, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that a 'bad link' TO you can actually hurt your site's SERPs.
Keep an eye out on who is linking to you.
-Dino
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