Brent Oxley, president and founder of Web hosting provider Host Gator (hostgator.com), says providing SEO services can require a host to walk a thin line between using inventive techniques to attract search engines, and activities that those search engines might consider exploitative.

Google (google.com) may use the various classes within a site's IP address to discover relationships between Web sites in an effort to spot spammers, and interlinked Web sites hosted on the same IP range may be inadvertently giving search engines the impression that they're spamming.

IP addresses that fall within the same class C range are likely to be close, and sometimes on the same server. According to Oxley, many SEO experts believe that Google or other search engine algorithms may use this info to penalize sites with the same C class for linking to each other. For Web hosts and their customers, this can be an understandably frustrating issue, since certain sites have similar themed content and may wish to host their Web sites in one location.

This was one of the considerations in Host Gator's recent launch of hosting services enhanced for search engine optimization under the brand, SEO Hosting. The service includes all the expected SEO capabilities, but more importantly, customers can use it to optimize their Web sites for search engines by enabling them to host on multiple C classes.

By offering multiple C Class capabilities, customers no longer have to host their Web sites with multiple Web hosts, and instead, can consolidate all their sites with Host Gator.

"Technology changes, our customers' needs change, and we need to move quickly to give our customers what they want," says Oxley.  "From our initial research, we also found that SEO hosting was an area that was underserved in the hosting industry, allowing us to stake a claim early."

Host Gator is offering the SEO Hosting service from $5 per month per C class. Customers can also choose to add or remove C classes at any point, while customers with more than 50 sites will be assigned a dedicated account representative. Oxley says that the new service should enable customers to save both time and money.

And while the common cynic would be quick to conclude that such a service caters to spammers, making their job easier by hosting with one vendor, Oxley has a different customer profile in mind.

"The primary users of our SEO hosting service will be Web masters with more than one Web property who are looking at multiple C classes," says Oxley.

The SEO Hosting brand is well timed, as demand for hosting on varied C classes continues to grow. To date, only a few Web hosting providers offer similar multiple C class hosting services, such as GotWebHost (gotwebhost.com) and SEO Web Hosting (seowebhosting.net).

"We do not know of anyone currently offering this type of service, which should give us a great jump on the competition," says Oxley. "Since no one else has been meeting this demand up until now, the response we've gotten from those looking for this type of hosting has been extremely encouraging."