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Why Good Hosting Affects Your Rankings
August 28th, 2010
A large number of webmasters and SEOs often agree that the condition of your web hosting can sometimes have a big influence on site performance in the SERPS. Here we discuss just a few reasons why this is likely to be true.
Reliability
You can expect a good level of reliability from the best hosting providers. Some companies state that they have server up time of very close to 100%, but this should be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s always a good idea to read some impartial studies regarding server reliability or contact some of the webmasters already on the hosting to gauge their opinions. Or perhaps you might want to look at cloud computing and relax safe in the knowledge that your site will be able to handle all eventualities, as cloud hosting companies “burst” their servers to continually provide enough bandwidth.
Having a site that is accessible more of the time will mean that search engines are always able to come back and crawl new content on your site. What is more, each time a search engines has no problem accessing your site, this gives it more confidence to include your site in search results for users to see. It would harm the search engine’s reputation if they kept sending people to sites that were down, so make sure you stay in their good books.
Speed
Not only are search engine spiders impatient and wont hang around on a slow site, but again search engines are reluctant to direct their users to poorly performing sites. An announcement was even made by Google early in 2010 that suggested they are now using site speed performance in their ranking algo, so its certainly something worth thinking about. Out of the numerous tools out there, Google very own site speed tool provides some excellent virtualization stats regarding your site’s speed performance over long period of time.
Good Neighbourhood
Not many people consider the other sites hosted on their shared hosting, but believe it or not their reputation can have a real influence on yours. If you are on the same hosting server as a site that sends out spam emails, hosts malware or is engaged in unscrupulous link building activities, you could find yourself with a bad rep also. If you’re unsure what your hosting neighbourhood looks like, carry out a reverse IP lookup on your domain, which should give you the information you need. Take some time to look at the profiles of the these sites sharing your hosting and don’t be scared to speak up or leave if everything doesn’t look Rosey.
