Does Web Hosting Affect Search Engine Rankings?
Common wisdom holds that because search engine optimization involves various factors and aspects of a website, is there a correlation between web hosting and search engine rankings as well?
The quality and dependability of your web host perhaps holds one the most vital attributes of the whole gamut. The basics say that in order to get ranked on search engines, your site needs to be up and functional all the time to allow Google crawlers index each and every page of your website. However, if your website server is down, search engines cannot crawl the site and index any changes made to it. As a result, all your optimization efforts deliver you zero output. This was about basics, there are other intrinsic factors associated with web hosting that affect SERPs.
1. Does Website Server Location Help with SERPs
Earlier in the dawn of Google, TLD was the key industry standard to find a site's relevancy for a specific area. However, Google set the trend to check for server's location, i.e. its IP address to turn the most relevant results in each country. This helped in determining a site's relevancy for a specific region.
Hence, even if you are not putting much effort into SEO, with your host's location it is assumed that your site is useful for users of that region, and hence you receive higher rankings.
2. Is my Ranking Affected If Spam Websites Are Sharing My IP Address
Shared hosting is a common phenomenon. It is often observed that hosting companies have a mix of clientele including few to many spamming sites as well. Google and other search engines understand that it is difficult to control the web hosts' clientele, hence there is no apparent damage to your site's ranking positions.
However, it calls for an action when there are thousands and thousands of spam/porn sites on your server as they invite you a lot of scrutiny from search engines that might affect your SERPs.
To check who else is sharing your IP address, go to bing.com and search for ip:<ip address>
3. Can Changing Host from one to another Affect SEO Ranking?
Well, it depends. If your web host is located in the same country, you need not worry much in this regard. This is so because
€ Your domain name is absolutely the same
€ Though your IP address is going to change but it doesn't matter as you belong to same country.
However, if you want to be extra cautious, you can set your DNA time/your TTL to be as low as 5 minutes, bring up your website on both locations for that time and switch to the new DNS.
As far as you see that the Google bot is able to visit all your pages then you can probably assume that it has registered that DNS has changed to new IP address. However, if you fail to lower your DNS time to lower levels, ideally you should keep your website on both locations for almost 24 hrs and switch to the new IP address. This way your site would see no effect whatsoever due to changes in the IP address.
The quality and dependability of your web host perhaps holds one the most vital attributes of the whole gamut. The basics say that in order to get ranked on search engines, your site needs to be up and functional all the time to allow Google crawlers index each and every page of your website. However, if your website server is down, search engines cannot crawl the site and index any changes made to it. As a result, all your optimization efforts deliver you zero output. This was about basics, there are other intrinsic factors associated with web hosting that affect SERPs.
1. Does Website Server Location Help with SERPs
Earlier in the dawn of Google, TLD was the key industry standard to find a site's relevancy for a specific area. However, Google set the trend to check for server's location, i.e. its IP address to turn the most relevant results in each country. This helped in determining a site's relevancy for a specific region.
Hence, even if you are not putting much effort into SEO, with your host's location it is assumed that your site is useful for users of that region, and hence you receive higher rankings.
2. Is my Ranking Affected If Spam Websites Are Sharing My IP Address
Shared hosting is a common phenomenon. It is often observed that hosting companies have a mix of clientele including few to many spamming sites as well. Google and other search engines understand that it is difficult to control the web hosts' clientele, hence there is no apparent damage to your site's ranking positions.
However, it calls for an action when there are thousands and thousands of spam/porn sites on your server as they invite you a lot of scrutiny from search engines that might affect your SERPs.
To check who else is sharing your IP address, go to bing.com and search for ip:<ip address>
3. Can Changing Host from one to another Affect SEO Ranking?
Well, it depends. If your web host is located in the same country, you need not worry much in this regard. This is so because
€ Your domain name is absolutely the same
€ Though your IP address is going to change but it doesn't matter as you belong to same country.
However, if you want to be extra cautious, you can set your DNA time/your TTL to be as low as 5 minutes, bring up your website on both locations for that time and switch to the new DNS.
As far as you see that the Google bot is able to visit all your pages then you can probably assume that it has registered that DNS has changed to new IP address. However, if you fail to lower your DNS time to lower levels, ideally you should keep your website on both locations for almost 24 hrs and switch to the new IP address. This way your site would see no effect whatsoever due to changes in the IP address.
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