SEO Gurus... How important are multiple/many IPs in 2017?
 

QUESTION: Now that "engagement" is the gold-standard metric for good search engine rankings, how important is breaking your sites off into multiple IP blocks?

If you have 100 quality (and unique) niche sites on one IP, will Google totally ignore you?

I think about Tumblr, EasyXSites, etc... many, many, many sites on relatively few IPs. But it's not uncommon to see Tumblr sites with high serps. Is that simply due to high engagement rates?

If all else is tied it would matter. If the sites like you say are quality it wont matter much for the rankings unless you can find some brilliant way to get them all on very very different ip's and totally different fingerprints so you can link them between themselves without google knowing they are connected at all.

I do not think it has much effect on your rankings. Quality updates are very important... as well as how often you update, which depends on the niche.

Ray
Hardlinks.org
An easy way to get backlinks

It's one of those things where it would help to be on different C-blocks, but not that big a deal if you can't. I'd still want to be on separate IP's so it doesn't appear that you own all the sites that are within the same IP-space.
WG

Cool guys. Thanks for your answers. You've expressed pretty much what I've been thinking.

Not much point in having your sites on many IPs if they are all hosted on same server/hosting, Google still will know you own them. If you want to do interlinking without Google knowing you actually operate all the sites, you will need to do certain things such like spreading your network over many different hostings, use various domain registrars etc.

Yeah that is only legit reason to have different ip address. Trick with c classes worked before when it was enough to have single word on website and it would be counted as backlink, now these days if site is very quality such backlink will have negative effect.