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SEO is all about back links and great
content. It has nothing to do with your web host, as long as your
site shows up. Right? Wrong!
Search engines positions are affected
by a number of parameters, the number of which some analysts put as
above two hundred. Out of these, most important parameters are of
course the back links and on page optimizations. But there are few
factors directly related to your web host, which can affect where
your site ranks for a particular keyword. In todays world where your
your competitors are trying out every white, black and grey hat
techniques, it is important to know how your host can hurt your
rankings. Read on for more information.
Local IP Address
It is well known that Google has a
presence in every country, like google.co.uk for UK and google.co.in
for India. Users from these countries search the local data centers
instead of google.com by default. Search results in each country
could vary to some extend, as Google tends to give local sites better
visibility. Even in countries where Google doesn't have a local
domain name, search results would be different from what someone in
US would see. Within a country, results can even vary from state to
state as well.
So how does Google identify the local
sites, that should be given priority when a user from London searches
Google UK? Simple- from the IP address of the site. A site hosted in
UK is obviously treated as local site to the people from that
country.
To ensure more traffic, a web master
should ideally host his site close to his targeted geographic area or
the country where he expect maximum traffic and revenue. Hosting in
US is more cheaper and better than most countries, but hosting close
to your targeted visitors have its own advantages. In addition to the
SEO, local sites tends to load a lot faster than the one hosted in a
far away location.
Class C IP Addresses
Most web hosts allow add-on domains to
a hosting account. That means, a web master with more than one site
needs just one hosting account to host them all, resulting in lot of
savings in hosting bills as well as ease of management. But the real issue with add-on domains
is when the web master want to link them (ideally one way, too many
two way links can land you in trouble). Most add on domains will be
sharing the same IP address and Google will easily identify them as
belonging to the same owner and such links will be of very low value. Even if you pay and get unique IP
address for each add-on sites, still they are most likely to belong
to the same Class C and would not make any difference. If you are
serious about linking your sites somehow to pass PR, you need a
specialized SEO hosting, that offer unique class C IP address for
each add on domains. Each new IP address are normally charged extra,
but serious web master would be more than compensated for the money
spend. If you need an SEO hosting suggestion, try SEO Hosting from
Hostgator.
Site Speed
Site speed was never known to affect
SEO, even though excessive down times used to be an issue. But
recently Matt
Cutts revealed that the speed could be a factor in SEO in
the years to come. So it pays to make sure that you are not hosted on
an overloaded server and pages are rendered fast.
Shared IP Address
In shared hosting, a single IP address
could be shared by a number of sites, some of them being spammy and
penalized. There are people who believe that sharing an IP address
with a bad neighbor could actually hurt your page rank. But we do not believe in that theory,
the reason being that the vast majority of the sites are hosted on
shared servers and would share the IP address with few spammers.
Google is smart enough to know this and you need not worry too much
about the shared IP address.
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