The Influence Your Hosting Has On SEO

A large number of webmasters and SEOs often agree that the condition of your web hosting can sometimes have a big influence on site performance in the SERPS. This article takes a look some of the reasons this might be the case.

Reliability

You can expect a good level of reliability from the best hosting providers. Most can claim to have uptime of around 99% of the time, but just because a company claims this it doesn’t mean it’s always true. There are some good unbiased reviews of web hosting companies to be found, but nothing quite compares to contacting sites who have already chosen the hosting and see what they think about reliability. Alternatively you could choose cloud computing and chill out, content in the knowledge that your web site will be able to deal with all occurrences, as cloud hosting offers sever “bursting” to continuously provide enough resources.

If your site has high levels of accessibility, the search engines will be free to pick up any new articles or content you publish quickly. What is more, each time a search engines has no problem accessing your site, this gives it more confidence to include your site in search results for users to see. It would harm the search engine’s reputation if they kept sending people to sites that were down, so make sure you stay in their good books.

Speed

Much like the reliability, search engines do not want to be sending their users to a site that takes forever to load and don’t even want their spiders going to sites where data is retrieved from the server at a poor rate. Google even announced earlier this year that it has started factoring site speed into its ranking algorithm, so it’s worth monitoring your performance closely. There are an increasing amount of free tools out there to help you monitor site speed, but through Webmaster Tools Google themselves offer decent virtualization information about the long term performance of your site.

Good Neighbourhood

Few webmaster pay attention to the other sites hosting on their shared sever, despite the fact they can heavily influence your reputation. If you are on the same hosting server as a site that sends out spam emails, hosts malware or is engaged in unscrupulous link building activities, you could find yourself with a bad rep also. Its a good idea to conduct a reverse IP lookup on your hosting server to establish what kind of company you keep. Be vigilant in your investigating of these sites and if you discover anything that worries you, talk to the hosting company about it or find hosting in a more healthy environment.