SEO Hosting Analysis PDF Print E-mail
Your web host may have a mayor influence on your web site ranking results in search engines. The majority of web sites are not indexed or get poor search engines rankings because of web hosting companies that focus on their own benefit and profits. You can see a list of the hosting companies that are most likely to offer non-professional grade hosting here.

The following are the most common shortcomings of hosting companies:

Your site got banned because your web host cloaks

Most of the large web hosting providers are changing the content under their client's domain if the client does not immediately upload a web site or if the site is removed from the domain for a period of time. When the page is requested by a search engine crawler, the requested page is redirected to a page that the web hosting provider has changed for their own benefit it typically contains links back to the web hosting provider's website or the websites of some of their other clients to increase their link popularity. Only the search engine robots can see the changed pages because the web host captures the search before it ever reaches your website by cloaking the URL, dynamically creating false web pages and then serving them up as if they were the actual pages hosted under this domain.

Why would my website be banned by the search engines?
Search engines penalize cloaking because cloaked web page do not return the same information as the page that was in the search engine ranking. It is considered spam and it doesn't matter how the cloaking occurs. When the search engine find out about it, your website could be dropped from their index. Obviously your web host could care less about you as a customer if it is engaged in this activity. And 99% of domain owners will never know what happened.

But if you - like many website owners - put a great amount of time and effort into your website marketing by playing by the rules and following all the guidelines like optimizing and writing good content you want to avoid getting penalized at all costs. You do this to ward off the search engine ranking and SPAM police or you pay out lots of hard earned cash to have someone do it for you.

How you can tell if your Web Site got banned
Go to Google and do a search that will return the pages you want to check for your website in their search engine rankings. Click on the "cached" copy of the web page. The copy you will see is the same one as the Googlebot sees. Carefully check the pages for unknown links. If the content of the page is different than the one you published and contains links to websites you were unaware of, there's a good chance your web host has changed them.

What should you do if you discover your domain has been misused by your web hosting company?
Contact your web hosting company immediately and also notify Google of the problem. If you've proven that your web hosting provider has changed your web pages, get another web host ASAP.

Your site got banned because your web host hosts hundred of self-managed sites on a single server

Most large hosting companies host hundreds of web sites on one web server under one IP address (shared hosting) and let any of the web site owners implement their own web site. This has two mayor downsides:

  • The performance of the server is probably very poor

Poor performance can prevent your site from getting indexed as the search engine robots (spiders) will only try to crawl your site so many times before they give up. If your site can not be served because other web sites hosted on that very server, your site may get ignored.

  • Your site could be blocked because of other web sites hosted on the same machine

Since the El-Cheapo web host lets everybody hosted on the same server freely manipulate their web site the IP that is assigned to that server could be blocked and with it your web site. Their are dozens of reasons why a search engines could decide to block an IP (email spamming, search engine spamming, keyword stuffing etc.). And all of these can trigger a ban by the search engine. Since the search engine will ban the only IP assigned to that server it will ban you web site with it. And statistically more than 1% of all web sites on the Internet are getting banned for measures that the search engines do not approve upon. Since your cheap web host typically hosts more than 200 sites on one machine there is a HUGE chance that your site is or will get banned.

No control over necessary features

Some software features that are necessary for optimal web sites performance (especially in search engines) are not being made available by cheap web hosting companies. Sever administration is a necessary part of search engine optimization. But the more often than not the necessary server access is not given to web site owners and they are unable to manipulate their web site to be optimized for search engine. Most prominently is the MOD Rewrite necessary to deliver static looking URLs to search engines.

Warning Signs: There is NO quality hosting offer under $10/month

Business grade hosting has it's price. Here - just like in any other area - you are getting what you pay for. Be extra careful when your host offers web site hosting at less than $10/month as the cost of quality hosting is significantly higher than that. And no for-profit organization will offer their services below cost.

Read here why cheap hosting is most likely bad hosting.

 
[ Back ]