Does Web Hosting Affect Search Ranking?

Yes! You got it right.

The Web hosting company you choose will surely have an effect on how and where your website ranks in search engines. Although choosing a great web hosting company alone does not bring about a boost in search rankings, it eliminates the negative consequences that come with choosing a phony web host.

web hosting affect ranking

When hunting for a great web hosting company, do not just look at the price tag. Instead, be keep and thorough in your search.

There are two factors that are vital for when it comes to search ranking. These factors are speed and downtime/uptime. It is worthwhile to note that these factors are subject to fluctuation from time to time.

You should therefore keep an eye on them, and if you notice any slight problem, do not hesitate to contact you web host’s customer support for assistance. Do not just sit back and hope that they will notice the problem themselves.

What is quite hilarious is that some hosts may realize there is a problem, but still choose to ignore. Do not stick with such companies. Run!

Also, it is better to pay monthly rather than upfront for two to three years. This allows you to walk out once the standards of the web hosting company begin to drop. If during the sign up process you opted for a long-term contract, and you start experiencing problems, forget about the money you paid and migrate to a better host. Losing a few bucks is actually better than causing irreparable damage to your website’s search ranking.

Let us now delve into the factors that have an effect on how your website ranks:

Speed
Search engines are often secretive when it comes to factors that make up their algorithms. Nevertheless, Google once revealed that a page’s loading speed is very crucial. Although speed may take up a small percentage when analyzing all the factors affecting search ranking, you should never ignore it. Try to check your pages’ loading speeds from different sites.

At times, a slow loading speed may not be the making of your web host. Other factors such as your site’s coding and configuration may be playing a major role. Conversely, if you are sure that the fault is originating from your web host, make a request so that you can be switched onto a different server.

If there are many sites on a given server, they will be use up a lot of resources. Consequently, loading speeds of pages will become slower. Loading speeds will considerable improve if you use a dedicated server or if you are simply moved to a less busy server.

Down time/Up time
Down time refers to the period of time your site becomes inaccessible, as a result of issues experienced by the host’s server. You will always receive visits from search engine spiders from time to time within a day.

If your site is still experiencing a down time during the visits, they will deem your site inaccessible and move on. If this occurs more often, your search rankings will be downgraded, and you will be flagged as “unreliable”.
Search engines loathe unreliable sites because inaccessibility is always a nuisance.

An ideal up time requirement of 100% is quite difficult to achieve. Even the most expensive web hosting plans cannot guarantee this. Since it is clear that down time is inevitable in most cases, do not accept an uptime of less than 99.9%.

Additionally, ensure your host is not hosting an illegal site because this may also affect you. Obviously, finding out about this is not an easy task, but by doing a thorough research, like reading web hosting reviews, you will know if your web hosting company is associated with anything fishy.

Due to greed, some hosts may not be keen on whom they choose to host. If in any case one of the hosted sites within the same server contains illegal content, the penalty issued to that site may also befall upon you. This is because the search engines will categorize you as being in the same “block” with that particular site.

Enough said. Before signing up for any web hosting plan, consider the above named factors. Making a wise decision will result in a better search ranking for your site.

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