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SEO: How does hosting influence your Google Rankings

by Tug Agency | 30.03.2011
Many people wonder how much influence the hosting server has over their site ranking positions. There are discussions about the difference in running your site on dedicated servers, shared hosting with poor quality sites, whether our sites should be run by local servers if our business is local or foreign servers if we are targeting something more global with .com domains.

First of all, y’all need to know that many of the answers to your questions (and fears) will be YES. But Google is pretty smart so they do take into account many factors, but none will be as important as your content, this should be your main goal: To have quality content. With that been said, let’s begin.

1. Will spam sites also hosted on my shared server affect my rankings?

The answer is YES and NO. Why? With whom you share your hosting servers could affect your rankings, but it shouldn’t if you have quality content. It also depends of how many spam sites are being hosted on that server … 20 or 2000.

2. If my hosting always crashes will this affect my SEO?

The answer is: YES. Whether your site recursively returns “page not found” messages or errors because of problems with your hosting, it doesn’t matter, the truth is that if your site is not found by Google when the crawl your site it will affect your rankings. Obviously they don’t want to rank a site that’s down most of the time and they do not appreciate it when you kill their spiders.

3. Will moving my hosting affect me?

The obvious answer here is NO. According to Matt Cutts, what you should do is to set the  domain TTL quite low for the DNSs… around 5 minutes… so that when you switch the site is not down for long, and you site starts running on your new server as soon as possible. If it takes you a week to move your site, yeh, I reckon you’ll see some keywords drop (temporally)

As long as you don’t change your domain, it shouldn’t affect anything.

4. Does the server location affect my rankings?

The answer is: YES. It is taken into account the location of your server. Although you can always set on webmaster tools the country you are targeting, hosting your servers locally and buying the proper TLD will always help, i.e. if you want your site to rank in the UK, you should get a co.uk domain and find a UK hosting server.