Does
Site Hosting Affect Google rankings
Does Site Hosting Affect Google rankings
After planning and developing a website the next part is to host
it on the Internet. Hosting is indeed an issue to spend time on
but a question arises: should you look at it with an SEO eye or
not? Website owners should be concerned with search engine optimization
as much as they are with prices and features when considering web
hosting.
Does choosing a host provider makes any difference in rankings
at search engines? If you submit your site repeatedly to Google
but it still is not indexed, then you might think your hosting provider
could be responsible.
There is a strong belief that for a website to rank high, it must
have a unique IP address. However, this idea doesn’t seem
necessary because these days most of the websites are hosted on
shared IPs. On a single computer many servers run side by side and
serve different domains from single IPs.
If you look at any SEO forum, you will see several topics old and
new trying to talk about web hosting concerns as well as name server
issues. The question people have in mind is close to, “A ‘cheap’
web hosting company hosts my site, but by the price of it, also
may be hosting spammers, scam sites or other banned sites like gambling
or porn. Does that affect my rank and does it risk my website?”
The answer in plain words is yes and no. It may affect you to some
extent, and no it may not affect you in other concerns. Read in
detail below.
If there is virtual shared IP hosting on the server, and Google
penalizes the server and IP due to spamming, then your website could
also be banned or otherwise penalized. Another situation can be
that your site resides on a server that also hosts adult content,
and Google can theoretically ban you both.
But it can’t be taken for granted that your site would be
banned for being on a “blacklisted” server, if your
content is acceptable. But to be on the safer side certain points
should be clear when hiring a web host.
Host should be up 24/7
For proper website services it must be up 100% of time so that
users aren’t looking at blank pages. Similarly, search engines
have no specific times that they will come to a website for crawling,
so your site must be up at all times in order to make search engines
happy. Even if the Googlebot encounters a 404 error it will come
again in the next crawl, but be on the safer side ensure 100% uptime
of your site.
Yes, all hosts take time for maintenance tasks, but they should
inform their clients that for a certain time of the work so you
can plan accordingly. But if your host does not inform you and you
browse your site and see a 404 error, then it might be time to consider
moving to a new host. This is so important because Google is believed
to have a smaller crawl daily and a deep crawl once a month, which
implies that Googlebot can come anytime. So your website must be
ready to receive this welcome guest.
Clean record
Google should have a good and clean record for your host, but
there is no mechanism to know that. However, as a tip, web hosts
that are very popular and used by large websites could be trusted
rather than unpopular ones. Have a look at http://support.easystreet.com/abuse/banned_ip.html.
For example, host Company X could offer very good and reasonable
packages, but a website hosted on it could face problems with optimizing
for Altavista if this host has been banned by AV, so your site may
miss the traffic coming from this popular search engine. But such
cases are rare - in a nutshell look for the prominent and reputable
names in this field.
Virtual shared IPs
Virtual shared IP is a system by which a web server uses the same
IP address for different domains. Instead of having new computer
for a server, multiple virtual servers are made to reside on the
same computer. Some web hosts can host 2,000 domains on a single
IP address; it all depends on the processing power and resources
available to the server and the quality of service that the host
wishes to provide to its clients.
In this case the web page fed to the search engines would be very
slow. However virtual shared hosting is a common scene as being
a cheap and reliable option and mostly accepted by engines especially
Google. Google does not ban sites by virtue of their sharing an
IP address with a misbehaving site. In the words of Craig Silverstein
of Google at an interview:
“Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their
links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP
does virtual hosting correctly, you'll never see a difference between
the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month
that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for
this persistent misperception.”
This makes it quite clear that Google does not penalize a site
on account of virtual hosting if it is configured the proper way.
Intelligent domain selection
Domain name selection should be very cunning and wise, if your
website has to serve a local market. For example, if it’s
the United Kingdom then a .uk domain is viable, and if the website
is intended for a global market then a top level domain of .com
is preferred. Domain selection will directly affect the ranking
of your website at Google, say, if a UK-based shoe company has .uk
domain it would rank higher for UK shoes search, otherwise the competition
is very much for general ones.
URL restructuring
Maintaining the proper structure of your URLs is also important,
as search engines face problems while indexing dynamic URLs (meaning,
URLs that have many parameters or long query strings). Google is
considered to be happy only with one or two parameters; if there
are more parameters, then it could be more difficult for the site
to be indexed.
Try to convert your dynamic pages to static ones, or let the server
do it for you to reduce the number of parameters in the URL. Apache
is the most popular web server and employs a special “rewrite”
module that allows you to convert dynamic long URLs to search engine
friendly web addresses. This module (mod_rewrite) is not installed
by default on the server, but many hosting companies can easily
install it. Once it is installed it can convert the following dynamic
URL http://www.ittips.com/index.php?page=index_v2&id=632&c=13
into http://www.ittips.com/computersindex_v2-632-13.htm
The new URL is more SEO friendly and desired by crawlers. Ensure
that your host has this module working to enjoy the benefits.
Conclusion
Hosting should not be the largest concern you have in an SEO program,
but there are certain exceptions to that. Hosts can be penalized
by Google for content reasons, and this may affect your site’s
performance. It is also preferable to look for individual IP address
so that risk of index removal is minimized.
Another thing that can be inferred is that sites hosted by free
web hosts may not rank highly at Google for the most competitive
keywords because of the obvious reason that free sites are mostly
prone to depleted content. In a nutshell, you must be thorough in
picking your web host and always clarify all issues before selecting
one. These small considerations can make you safe for your further
plans toward search engine optimization.
About the Author Nakul Goyal has degrees
in Master of Sciences in Information Technology from Panjab University,
Chandigarh and a Bachelor of Computer Applications from Punjab Technical
University, Jalandhar, India. He is a Microsoft Certified Professional,
a Brainbench Certified 'MVP' (Most Valuable Professional), Brainbench
Certified Internet professional and a CIW (Certified Internet Webmaster)
Associate. Website: http://www.nakulgoyal.com
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