Robert Fisher recently asked a question over at Moz regarding the use of CDNs to potentially hide a link network. In the past, there has been (and currently is still) an issue regarding linking websites together that are hosted on the same Class C Blocks of IPs. Essentially, if you own several websites, they’re hosted on the same server, then they will be on the same Class C Block of IP addresses. So, the search engines can easily see that you most likely own all those sites linked together by looking at the sites’ IP addresses.
The question was posed over at Moz about the fact that if you used a CDN (Content Delivery Network) such as CloudFlare (which I use currently for this site), then you wouldn’t have to worry about the Class C block of IPs. In theory, the search engine would ignore the IPs being on the same Class C Block because it’s possible that several sites are using Cloudflare.
Unfortunately, though, that theory, while a good concept, just doesn’t fly.
There are tools out there that allow you to see the “real” IP address of a website using a CDN. For Cloudflare, for example, you can use this one:
http://www.crimeflare.com/cfs.html
CDN Planet has a CDN finder tool, but that one from Crimeflare will show you the IP address of the server if it’s using Cloudflare.