Mar 12

Interesting Connection Between Hosting and SEO

Hosting-and-SEOIf you have many questions about the SEO of your website, perhaps one of them is does web hosting have any influence on SEO. The answer is “yes”.  The company which hosts your website has an effect on the rank your website will achieve in the search engines. A right web hosting provider may not guarantee you a ranking boost, but you certainly avoid the consequences, that too significant ones, of picking a wrong host. Therefore it is essential to choose the web host carefully and not based on price alone. Visit here to know more about an excellent web hosting company and its key features.

Out of the 3 web hosting factors – speed, uptime and downtime – two affect SEO and can fluctuate considerably from month to month, and so you should regularly review them. Immediately when you see a problem, you have to contact your web host. Don’t assume that they know the problem. And even if they might know about it, they might not care. This is a reason, also for not locking yourself into a long-term contract of web hosting.

Paying on a monthly basis rather than for 1 or 3 years in advance gives you a facility of moving to another host, as soon as you notice a drop in your current host’s standards.

Let’s consider the 3 web hosting factors in detail that can affect the ranking of your website.

Uptime/Downtime

Downtime refers to the amount of time during which your website is unavailable due to problems in the server it is hosted on. Probably search engine spiders will try to reach your website a number of times in a day. If they visit during the downtime period, they record that the site is inaccessible and go on to the next site. If this keeps on repeating, your site gets flagged as undependable and your ranking may go down. Search engines don’t wish to display sites which are unreliable high in their results because it affects them badly if searchers click on the site they have shown and then cannot access that site. Even 99% uptime indicates that over a period of one month your website will be unavailable to users for about 7 hours. Obviously you want your site to be accessible 100% of time. But some downtime is inevitable, though you have chosen a high profile web hosting plan. However, it is reasonable to expect 99.9% of uptime from a web host, so no need to expect anything less.

Speed

Usually search engines prefer not to disclose the factors that make their algorithms. However, Google openly stated in 2010 that the speed at which pages load is one of the factors. It is just one of more than 200 factors, and therefore it almost definitely has a less than 0.5% effect on your rankings. But still it is worth taking a notice. Some tools for checking the loading speeds for your pages are:

http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

http://gtmetrix.com/

However, it is not always the fault of your web host that your loading speed is slower than average. The configuration and coding may also be the culprits. But if you surely know that your site’s technical setup is optimized as good as it can be, and still you are getting poor loading time, you need to ask your web host to move your site to some better server. It is usual for website to share server resources with many other sites and the more sites on a server and the more resources those sites use, the slower your website. If your site is moved to a less busy server, or a private/dedicated server, the loading speed will immediately improve.

Location

Apart from various other factors like backlinks, content etc search engines also consider the location of a website while deciding where to position it in their rankings to show the most appropriate search results. For example, if the person searching is located in India, the search engines will usually display sites based in India higher up in their results. To decide where your site is located, search engines use a variety of indicators, one amongst which is the IP address. That IP address is allotted to your site according to the location of the server on which it is hosted. Therefore, hosting your site with a company with servers in India should result in higher rankings for your website when people in India search for your targeted keywords. The downside of this is your site’s rank will be lower in the search results when people from other countries will search for the same keywords. You still can rank your site high in one country though it is hosted on servers in some other country. However it is a bit difficult task to do and such extra work doesn’t make any sense if it can be avoided easily.