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Have you ever took a minute
to ask yourself if your host is affecting your rankings
with Google? It's a very prominent question that
I personally have never really taken into consideration
til today. |
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After planning and developing a website
the next part is to host it on the internet. Web Hosting
is indeed an issue to be spent time on but the question
arises if you need to look at it with your SEO eye or
not? The issue of ‘Web Hosting’ is not just related
to the price and features of web hosting provider offered
but website owners who are far sighted consider some
other factors too and one of those factors is search
engine optimization. Does choosing a host provider makes
any difference in rankings at search engines. If you
submit your site again and again to Google but still
isn’t able to get it indexed then you must give a thought
to your host provider who may be responsible. There
is a strong belief that a website to rank higher must
have a unique IP address but on the other hand it doesn’t
seem necessary because these days most of the websites
are hosted on shared IP’s. On a single computer many
servers run side by side and serve different domains
from single IP’s.
If you look at any of those SEO forums, you will see
several topics old and new trying to talk about web
hosting concerns as well as name servers issues!! The
question people have in mind is “A ‘cheap’ web hosting
company hosts my site but, by the price of it, also
may be hosting numerous spammers, scam sites, or other
banned sites like Gambling and or Porn. (But for less
then 10 bucks per month they'll give you 5000 MB and
unlimited domains!). 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.
Well there are certain situations like if the domain
sharing your server and IP is penalized by Google on
account of spamming then your website is also expected
to be banned or penalized, this is a condition if there
is virtual shared IP hosting. Another situation can
be that your website is residing on the server containing
illegal adult content, and that site too is on the hit
list of Google resulting in your website to be banned
too. But it is never taken for granted that if such
co incidence happens then your website is surely affected
because it is common sense that for a mistake by one
person another one cannot be punished. Still to be on
the safer side certain points should be made clear while
hiring a web host.
Host should be 24/7 up: For proper website services
it must be up 100% of time so that users aren’t encountered
with blank page at times. Similarly search engines have
no specific timings to come to a website for crawling
so it must be up at all times in order to make search
engines happy. If googlebot encounters a 404 error it
will come again in the next crawl, so to be on the safer
side ensure 100% uptime of your site. Yes maintenance
tasks all hosts do but they should inform well in advance
that for such and such period the site will be down
due to maintenance so that you can plan accordingly
but on the other hand if your host doesn’t informs you
and you browse your site to see a 404 error then you
must consider moving to another one. 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: The record of the host should
be good at Google, although there is no mechanism to
know about it but web hosts that are very popular and
extensively used by big websites could be trusted rather
than unpopular ones. Have a look at http://support.easystreet.com/abuse/banned_ip.html.
For example a host hypermart.com offers very good and
reasonable packages of hosting for general as well as
dedicated hosting but a website hosted on it could face
problems with optimizing at Altavista because this host
service has got banned by Altavista and miss the traffic
coming from this popular search engine. But such cases
are rare and in a nutshell look for the prominent and
reputable names in this field.
Virtual shared IP’s: 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 2000 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 feed to the search
engines would be very slow. However these days 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 local market say for example UK then a .uk
domain is viable and if the website is intended for
a global market then a top level domain of .com must
be preferred. Domain selection will directly affect
the ranking of your website at Google as in the above
example if a shoe company uk has .uk domain it would
rank higher for UK shoes search otherwise the competition
is very much for general ones.
URL restructuring: With web hosting maintaining
the proper structure of your URL’s is also important,
search engines face problems while indexing dynamic
URL’s (URL’s having many parameters or long query strings).
Google is considered to be happy only with one or two
parameters and more of the parameters the more it will
be difficult to index them. Try to convert your dynamic
pages to static ones, or let the server do it for you
the other way to reduce the number of parameters passed
in the URL which will help the page to be indexed fast.
Apache is the most popular web server and employs a
special “rewrite” module that allows you to convert
the dynamic long URL’s to search engine friendly web
addresses, this module (mod_rewrite) is not installed
by default on the server but many hosting companies
install it additionally being very easy. 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
(Shameless Self Promotion, ITTips.com is owned by the
Author of this ArticleJ) The new URL generated by the
server that is accessible on the web is more SEO friendly
and much desired by crawlers. Ensure that your host
has this module working to enjoy the benefits.
Hosting does not matter that much although certain exceptions
are always there i.e some host is penalized by Google
but that way Google is intelligent in its operations
and cannot deploy it unless compelled to do so. It is
preferable to look for individual IP address so that
risk of index removal is minimized. An expert advice
can always save your time and money a great deal that
is very precious which otherwise you learn by experience.
Another thing that can be inferred is that sites hosted
by free web hosts aren’t expected to rank high in future
at Google for most competitive keywords because of the
obvious reason that free sites are mostly prone to depleted
content. In a nutshell you must be thorough with your
web host and always clarify all issues before selecting
one. These small considerations can make you safe for
your further plans towards search engine optimization.
Good Luck
About The Author
Nakul Goyal : A Master of Sciences in Information Technology
from Panjab University,
Chandigarh and a Bachelor of Computer Applications from
Punjab Technical University,
Jalandhar, India. He is passionate towards the Cyber
World & he likes to write about
Technology. He's a Microsoft Certified Professional,
a Brainbench Certified 'MVP' (Most
Valuable Professional), Brainbench Certified Internet
professional and a CIW (Certified
Internet Webmaster) Associate. Professionally, Nakul
is the co-founder of a Web Designing, Search Engine
Optimization Company. Website: http://www.nakulgoyal.com
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