Do you know that your web hosting package can affect your SEO? Yes it’s true. New algorithms in Google now also count where your website hosts? If there is one penalized site in Google hosted on shared server, it can affect other sites also. Now the question is how to choose an effective web hosting service that will not affect your SEO rankings. That’s also true rankings in search engines not depends only on web hosting services you opt, in fact there are more than thousand Google algorithms that decides where to rank your website for particular set of keywords.
There are many web hosting factors that can decide your SEO rankings such as your IP address, uptime or downtime, speed of the server etc. One has to regularly monetize these factors at least once a month. If you feel there is a problem occurs you should contact your web hosting company immediately. Do not feel that web hosting company know about your problem and even if they know they might not act as it is not of their concern. Therefore, it is always advisable to choose top web hosting service providers to get rid of such problems and don’t find yourself with a web hosting company into a long-term contract.
Pay monthly for the webhosting service instead of 1 year and whenever you feel that the web hosting company not providing you the high quality services, move to another web hosting company. If you have bind into long term contract and start facing issues than it is better to leave the web hosting company rather than restrict yourself in the contract. Move to a better web hosting company might lead to loss of few bucks but it is better to save your long term SEO rather than few bucks.
Table of Contents
Main Factors that one should consider to make sure that their SEO rankings will not suffered
Uptime/Downtime of Servers
Uptime means the period of time your site remains up on the server without any problems. You should choose a webhosting company whose servers never down. Downtime refers to the amount of time in which your website is inaccessible by users due to the server problems. Search engine robots can visit your website whenever they want and sometimes they can visit your website on hourly basis as well if you used to frequently update your content. If the search engine crawlers or spiders visit your website or blog at the time when it is down and inaccessible by users and search engines, a negative notification posed to search engines about your website. If it happens on frequent basis then your site will treated as unreliable and your rankings in that case may down in search engines. Search engines do not want to show results which provide bad experience to users as it can not only down the standard of down website but also of search engines. Every web hosting company may down the server for a particular time period for 2 to 3 hours for maintenance purpose in month or quarterly. This would not cause any issues in your SEO rankings.
Speed of the Servers
Search engines were not much elaborative about this web hosting factor and keep it as a secret but in 2010 Google has explicitly announced that the website loading speed is now one of the key factors to determine rankings of websites. Search Engine land confirmed the same about site speed as a ranking factor. It is one of the factors of ranking algorithms and may worth only 0.5% in determining your rankings but still one has to pay special attention to it. You can check speed for your page loading here:
The ideal loading time for a website or blog should be less than 3 seconds and if your site or blog takes more time than this than you could affect your SEO metrics that may include bounce and returning visitors as well. This 3 second ideal page loading time fact is based on the extensive and in-depth report provided by PhoCusWright/Akamai report.
A slower page loading time than ideal one is not necessarily the fault of your web hosting service providers. Many times it is the fault of the website or blog owners who put up heavy images, flash and other such things that makes their site heavy and ultimately slows it. But if you are confirmed that the slow page loading speed time is not from your side and you have properly optimized the site speed than you can contact your web hosting company and ask them to move your site to other server.
IP address
IP address is a unique number that is allotted to each server and it can identify the location of the server on internet. Your website would share the IP addresses of other websites if you are on shared server and if any of the sites on that IP is penalized by Google than it can suffer the rankings of other websites hosted on that server. You must know the list of websites hosted on the same server and if found any of the website that is suffering your rankings, you must contact your web hosting company. However, if you are on dedicated server you may not feel any kind of problem as you would have a unique IP address that is assigned to you only. Read about the different types of webhosting servers.
Server location
Server location closely related to IP address as Google identifies the server’s physical location from the IP address. Server location is important to identify the rankings in search engine because Google ranks a local website good in search engines if the server is in the same location. So, if you want to optimize your website locally than you should find the hosting company in nearby areas.
