While watching the blogsphere, I encountered a conversation on the topic of hosting I'd like to share.
"So is it really risky business to think about moving your website to another host? Does it really affect your website rankings?
The answer is NO simply because no search engine crawler takes IP address orweb hosting company or name servers as any of their factors to rank your website. But if crawlers find your website “unreachable“, you will be punished. So utmost care has to be taken while you move your website to different server."
Although this is a topic of interest especially to those who are concerned with their current hosting environments, It's worth noting that it's not entirely accurate.
My response outlines the challenges that we face when making this decision and sometimes the leap of faith taken.
While I agree with the idea that changing hosts *should not* impact the overall ranking of a site in the big 3, there is evidence to suggest otherwise. In a patent received by Google recently they clearly define that there are implications associated with having links to your site hosted from a similar IP octet. As such, having a site hosted on a server where many of your incoming links also reside could impact your ranking by minimizing their value, even if it is via accident. This does however go to show you the importance of your host in the overall SEO mechanism. Not only do we need to concern ourselves with the reachability of our sites and it’s potential impact, but we also need to be wary of hosting where the majority of our inbound links host.
*note – although the impact is possible, it is unlikely. The effort of this algorithm was to prevent those blackhat companies from hosting 50 domains on the same account and cross-linking to one another to better their seo, not to penalize the single site owner for their choice of hosts. It also may be worth noting that the same patent confirmed that there is a limitation on the value of links from any given site. For instance you may see (hypothetical) 1=1, 3=3 but beyond 3 links the value may still be 3. This is a simple representation of a much more robust algorithm, but the issue is that if your being penalized via host, and further limiting the value based on how many links come from a specific domain, the overall value may be much smaller than predicted.
Cheers to a topic which needed to be addressed!
As you can see, the host is just one part in a much larger puzzle that Search Engine Optimization companies face when helping their clients get the most out of their online marketing. Research and understanding the search engines and their impact as well as intent is 90% of our daily time spent.
The original blog story can be found here [http://www.kpmrs.com/blog/2010/08/knowledge-bank/how-changing-web-hosts-affects-search-engine-rankings/]
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