The quality of your hosting and the SEO status of your website
Created on Thursday, 14 April 2011 19:32 Published Date Written by Super User Hits: 915
Traditionally, hosting, has always been an afterthought in the webmaster’s SEO planning. Because hosting is extremely technical (even more so than SEO as a matter of fact) few people feel competent enough to critically assess it and even fewer actually spend any time thinking about it. That, also, is the point where many websites come unstuck.
What most people do not realise is that hosting is the foundation upon which a website has been built. If the hosting company you have chosen does not have carefully managed servers, guaranteeing uptime, monitoring traffic spikes and spreading the load to ensure bandwidth does not become an issue. When it comes to hosting, failed servers (which lead to your website’s downtime), inaccessible websites (due to bandwidth restrictions), slow-loading sites (because the server speed is not up to scratch) and sites which freeze (because of intermittent server response) add to what Google now officially calls ‘a bad end-user search experience’.
In plain-speak this means that if Google has rated your website high and ranks it on the first page of its search engine results pages (SERPs) then those who click on it will experience the disappointing server performance which will affect how your website is served to them and they, in turn, will feel disappointed.
More than that, the disappointment will rub off on their Google search experience and this will affect Google. You can see now why Google has imposed, officially, as of this month a filter on sites which have bad hosting, slow servers or insufficient uptime (as reported by the Google bot) which means that now it becomes one of the metrics which affect your SEO status and one of the penalties if your hosting is not rock-solid.
What should you do to avoid being penalized by Google? The simple answer is monitor your hosting using a paid service like uptime spy or the free package (for a single site) from siteuptime - these two are just suggestions. If you run a Google search you will find a host more.
If your hosting is deficient, well, move to a more reliable hosting provider.
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