Let us tell you now, hosting affects seo rankings. There are many different factors that go into search engine optimization (SEO) and getting your website to the first page of Google and the other search engines. Some factors are large, some small, and some actually seem to vary quite a bit depending on a variety of other issues that also seem to be in play. One of the factors in how high your website ranks in the search engines involves the quality of your hosting.
Does Web Hosting Affect SEO Rankings?
Most SEO specialists have known this for many years now. As a general rule of thumb the faster your website loads, the faster your hosting loads your website, the better your site will rank. There is more to that, but this is a good general guide to use as a starting point. Fast loading times will help while slow loading times will hurt. Extremely slow loading times can be deadly when it comes to SEO.
What else matters?
There are several different ways your hosting affects seo rankings. Just a few of the things to look at include:
– Total up time vs. down time in a month
– Speed your website is loaded
– Individual I.P. address versus a shared I.P. address (individual is better if possible)
– Amount of “questionable” websites on the same shared hosting server (if you’re using shared hosting)
All of these factors are very important when it comes to having SEO-friendly hosting which will not only help to boost your rank but most important, helps you dodge the many potential pitfalls and land mines that come from bad hosting.
How much does hosting matter?
There are still some disagreements about how little (or how much) of a factor hosting is when looking at the SEO of a website. Recent testing by several sites seems to indicate that hosting has become more important in recent years as a part of the overall puzzle and because of that it’s safe to say that hosting can now be considered a major ranking factor instead of a minor one.
Keep this in mind when finding a quality hosting plan. Even if you have to start off with general shared hosting, not all shared hosting providers and accounts are equal. Your hosting provider does matter, and you need to know with confidence that your website is going to be up, fast and easy to load, and not surrounded by questionable websites.
Does the type of hosting matter?
The answer is yes, mostly because of the inherent pros/cons with each type. If you’re on shared hosting, for example, even when it runs well your site is still going to load a bit slower, and you always have the danger of being on the same hosting as spammy websites, and that penalty can hit you. In general, shared hosting will be brought down by a true “going viral” moment and heavy traffic flow can slow things down.
On the other hand if you have a good server or virtual private server, the speed tends to be great and can handle a “going viral” load of traffic. This is all in addition to the fact that with those styles of hosting you don’t have to worry about possible penalties from being associated with a bad website on the same hosting account.
Indirect ways hosting affects other SEO areas
One of the things Google does is check the IP addresses of where hosting accounts come from. The reason for this is to prevent someone from creating 30 websites on shared hosting and then getting links from each of them in a black hat SEO technique. Because of this for each link from a specific IP (each shared hosting account has its own IP address) is worth a little bit less than those before it.
This isn’t something you’re going to directly control but it is an interesting note, especially if you had a plan to boost your rankings using this method.
Hosting affects SEO rankings. It matters!
While it’s not the highest priority of SEO, terrible hosting shatters rankings while great hosting will definitely help. Hosting is a very important part of the overall ranking process and understanding that will help you make smart decisions moving forward.
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