Search Engine Optimisation
Ask 10 SEO Experts A Question And You'll Get 11 Different Answers
How does website hosting affect SEO?
As part of the initial SEO assessment, Optillion reviews the client’s existing web hosting arrangements and investigates any issues impeding implementation of the SEO campaign. Website hosting arrangements may affect search engine rankings in four main ways:
- Frequent server failures and site unavailability
Server failures impact upon a search engine spider’s ability to index a website. When spiders visit a web page, it sends a list of all the links on that page back to the search engine to be visited at a later date. If the spider subsequently visits one of the URLs and receives a ‘page not found’ error message due to server failure, it will have missed the chance to index new or updated content. If this happens on repeated visits it is highly likely that the page, and ultimately the entire site, will be removed from the search engine’s index. - Server location
Server location helps determine where a website will rank in a search engine’s regional results. For UK businesses with a UK client base, it is important that the website achieves high rankings in the UK results. In order to do this, the website must either be hosted on a UK based server or have a domain name including the country identifier .uk. Having both will boost your rankings in Google’s UK results. Many UK hosting companies actually host websites on servers based in the USA, taking advantage of cheaper costs while inadvertently impacting upon your rankings. - Problems with using free web hosting
Free web hosting services pose practical problems for the practice of optimisation. Sites hosted on these types of services will have domain names that point towards ‘framesets’. Framesets do not contain individual web pages, so search engines are prevented from indexing the site effectively. - Online web site building programs
Sites built using online tools are almost impossible to optimise because of the restrictions placed on constructing individual pages. Without the freedom to effectively customise the structural elements of a page, SEO is impracticable. These programs also generate ‘bloated’ coding which is completely lacking in structure, which is very difficult for search engine spiders to navigate.
