I intend to cover two points : 1 – The impact on SEO from hosting and 2 – What to look for in a hosting company to maximise your results.
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Search engines evaluate all websites based on a number of factors. This evaluation aims to do four main things for the search engine results:
• Ensure quality and relevance of results
• Avoid duplication of results
• Avoid delivery of multiple results from the same basic provider
• Avoid delivery of untrustworthy results
This is fundamental to all search engines and as a result, hosting plays an important part of this.
A good hosting provider is of course a focal point for the web site success. Traditionally when looking at a hosting partner you would have to look at elements such as space, bandwidth, level of service, speed, however today, SEO hosting is proving to be just as important. A good point to note is that PPC works globally, natural listings from spiders and bots will not work without some form of local hosting.
The impacts on hosting can be severe to your site and its search listings – As a general rule of thumb the following apply.
Server uptime
Imagine Google spiders your 100,000 page site and one day finds 10,000 pages are not working. Those pages will drop from the index until Google crawls them successfully again. If each page had good rankings, each might send 1 visitor per day? - suddenly you have lose 10,000 unique visitors per day from your site even though your main keywords are still ranking highly.
Multiple domains
Multiple domains hosted on the same server indicate to the search engines that they might belong to the same company. Links from multiple domains hosted with the same provider indicate artificial link building with the aim of influencing search results. If you are hosting multiple sites on one IP and linking from one to another, prepare to be de-listed.
You pay for what you get
Websites hosted with blacklisted hosting companies are likely to be unreliable. Pay for it!! free hosting can be slow, unreliable and have bandwidth limitations.
Location
Most importantly, the location of the website host provides the search engine with information about the location of the business and thereby enables it to provide more relevant results based on location of searchers.
For example, a website hosted in London is more likely to be relevant to a person searching for a service in London than a website hosted in New York. If you are in New York and search for a book shop, you would expect results local to you or at least American.
Ideally, if you want a ranking on Google in America, you need a physical presence out there, or at least an IP address that is related to the territory in question.
There are 2 common approaches to obtaining this IP address…
Mirror your infrastructure in the territory you want to be listed or use a CDN (Content delivery Network) with dynamic elements coming from centralised server.
Mirroring your infrastructure is a neat solution for smaller low traffic sites. If the site is dynamic in nature, you can have each territory pulling relevant information from a centralised database. A single web server located in the USA will give you natural listings in that region. However, from a web site owner’s perspective, you have a single point of failure in that region, perhaps the need for additional internal support staff but you do have lower costs than using a CDN.
A CDN is the easy solution for high traffic sites that need scalability and reliability 24/7. CDN’s are used extensively by Disney, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to name but a few. For those web site users in the the UK entering http://www.microsoft.com/ into their browser window, they are published a copy of the site form the UK through a CDN. A CDN is more expensive than an internally managed solution if using a single server but does provide benefits in speed, bandwidth availability and uptime. There is no single point of failure.
A few companies offer CDN networks. Akamai is probably the best know due its high profile clients, but other providers such as NTT Europe have similar products. The NTT Eurpore product is called the SCD ( Smart Content Delivery) and is described in this image.
Once you have your hosting model established, you need to be aware of certain points with your hosting provider to maximise natural listings. These include
Can you have 302 and 301 redirects?
If you have a web presence and then move your url to something new as a result of an internal rebrand, you still need all the search engine links of your old site to go to your new site. 301 and 302 redirects are the search engine friendly way of doing this without affecting your listings.
Can you create custom 404 errors?
If a page is not found on your server from when a user clicks a link through, generally they will hit the back button in the browser and go back to the search results page and select the next link. If you can create a 404 page not found result that is branded and has a site search bar, they may stay in your site and not go back to the search engine results page.
To Summarise:
• Don’t use free hosting for any commercial enterprise
• Get a unique IP for each web site you own.
• Use dedicated servers if possible.
• Host servers in the territories you wish to be listed. CDN or local hosting,
• Get 99.9% uptime guaranteed.
• Ask for whitelisted SEO friendly servers
• Ensure you have enough control of your server set up.
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