Sorry - my reply was not as complete as it could have been.
Here is what SEORank wrote about it:
Quote:
How does Hilltop define affiliate sites?
*Affiliate sites are defines as follows –
Pages that originate from the same domain (www.ibm.com, www.ibm.com/us/, products.ibm.com, solutions.ibm.com etc.)
Pages that originate from the same domains but with different top level and second level suffixes (like www.ibm.com, www.ibm.co.uk, www.ibm.co.jp etc.)
Pages that originate from neighborhood IPs (first 3 common octet in the IP number like 66.165.238.xxx is common)
Pages that originate from affiliate of affiliates (if www.abc.com is hosted on the same IP octet as www.ibm.com, then www.abc.com is an affiliate of www.ibm.co.uk even if they are on a different IP series)
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Source:
http://www.seorank.com/analysis-of-h...-algorithm.htm
It does not mean that Google are actually doing this. But this was in the document that is related to the patent that Google got - so there is a good chance that they are.
CBP