May 15th, 2010 by Nick

As long as everything is running smoothly, the web hosting company chosen for a website makes no difference at all from a search engine optimization point of view. This is no reason for complacency, however, because if the service does become disrupted the consequences can be extremely dire. It makes sense to choose a hosting company based on how reliable a service it provides, rather than concentrating solely on cost.

In addition to reliability, there is another consideration. The geographical location of one’s web host can affect a website’s placing in search results in a positive way. This is because search engines look at where the web server is located as part of assessing a website for inclusion in local search listings. As being placed in local search results makes a huge difference for some companies, it may be wise to think about choosing a web host which is, at least, in the same country as one’s own business.

If there are problems with the servers of a web hosting provider, leading to a website being constantly unavailable, not only is this annoying for human visitors, it also affects search robots. When robots are prevented from crawling the pages of a site they are unable to index them, and the pages have no chance of appearing in search results, or they appear but have low ratings due to the apparent lack of any content.

Sometimes web servers may be functioning but are extremely slow. This can lead to visitors becoming impatient and moving to other sites. It is also hopeless for search robots, as they may only be able to crawl part of a page in the time they have available, or they may move on before the page loads at all.

Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that search engines block a whole range of IP addresses that include spam sites, and this could include one’s own, perfectly legitimate site. There is also the possibility of having a shared IP address with a dubious neighbour. This is one of the reasons why it can be preferable to have a static IP address, one which is not shared with any other sites.

Some web hosting companies set limits on the activity of a site, perhaps by restricting bandwidth. This could be problematic if a site grows to become extremely popular, with a resulting increase in visitor traffic. Not only will web visitors be denied entry to the site but search spiders will be unable to get in to crawl it. In a similar way, some web hosts are overly suspicious concerning repeated requests to view pages and will make sure access is limited in this situation, which can sometimes prevent search robots from doing their job properly.

Taking all this into consideration, it makes sense to choose a web hosting company carefully. It could be worth spending a bit more in order to obtain a better-quality service and protect against any negative consequences for SEO.

At SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk we carefully consider all the factors that affect a website’s success.

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.