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10 Ways Hosting Effects SEO

2014-09-04by David Allison

With such a vast number of specialised SEO hosting companies claiming to help their customers climb Google search rankings, we firstly need to understand if there is any truth to these claims. Can hosting effect our search engine ranking? In short yes, however understanding how and why will help us when choosing the right host for our websites.

Hosting Location

The biggest ranking factor related to hosting is location. Hosting your website in a specific location increases the chances your websites will rank well in google for that location. If you have a business located in the United Kingdom but host your website from France, your website will most likely rank better for google.fr than google.co.uk.

 

Hosting Neighbours

This is one of the most widely feared issues when using shared hosting or virtual private servers. There is a view that Google groups websites using the same C-class IP address, and while this is true to some degree, Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) has explained this in a Youtube video back in late 2012. From what he says I wouldn’t worry too much about it, unless you are sharing your IP with a rather large number of spam sites. You can however check who you share you shared IP with here.

 

Benefits

Some hosts are starting to realise how much their customers value SEO and are providing tools to help rank their customers websites. It's a good idea to have a look at what hosts have to offer. Although it is worth mentioning most tools hosting companies offer are very basic and can be done in Webmaster Tools or elsewhere.

 

Hardware Speed

Google takes site speed into account in its ranking algorithm. When looking for a host make sure that it is fast enough, I recommend looking for one that uses SSD storage. Avoid hosts that you suspect may oversell their shared hosting, as this can easily make your site very slow. Especially when you have a large website using numerous databases for example, Wordpress.

 

Network Speed

Google loves to improve user experience and takes account of the website load time when ranking. One recommendation I would make is looking at routing your DNS through a free service such as Cloudflare which speeds up load time of your website. 

 

Host reputation

Although not directly effecting SEO the hosts reputation as a whole should be taken into account when looking to host your website. A general look at their reputation will give you a good idea if you should be worried about any of the previous points in this article.

 

Bounce rate

One of the big factors that rank websites on Google is bounce rate, this represents the percentage of visitors to your website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. Having a host that is reliable and has a good uptime can keep your bounce rate low, subsequently helping your search engine ranking.

 

Security

Last month (August 2014) Google announced that it will be taking HTTPS into account when ranking a website. Although this has little significance in rankings now, it will have more significance as time goes by. Try and look for a hosting company that will support you with this however some hosts will even provide a free Private SSL Certificate. 

 

Elasticity

You may of heard the phrase “Content is king” when looking at an SEO forum or blog. In the eyes of Google, quality content and user experience are both really important. When you create your next piece of content to go viral consider if your hosting company can handle the traffic. Its no good creating a great piece of content if your server cant handle the traffic if it goes viral.

 

Up-time

Its a good idea to look for a host that has good uptime. Having your website go down often can hurt your search engine ranking and even get it de-indexed if you don't correct it. If this is a concern to you, there are many companies that can monitor your website for down time.

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Author

David Allison

David Allison is an SEO Guru for Amigo Loans - a UK based guarantor loans company

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