26 Dec How hosting affects the SEO
Hosting is the basic need to host a website, we all know. But many of us don’t know that there are some points that impact on our hosting except the cost. Most of the people only consider the cost and features come with that cost when buying any hosting plan ignoring some very important things that may let you suffer from site’s SEO and rankings. Let’s discuss some of them and how hosting affects the website’s SEO.
1. Downtime
Downtime is the time your website is not available or not accessible due to any server related problem where your website is hosted on. Search engine spiders crawl the website at some intervals and visit the page like a user. If at that time the server is not reachable by the crawler, it will move to the next website and if this repeats several times, your website may get flagged as inaccessible and it may hurt the crawling rate of the website. This can cause a ranking downgrade.
The search engine doesn’t want to display any unreliable website to the visitors and for that, it moves other website links upper than this website.
For better performance and less downtime, you will need 100% uptime services. However, some minor downtime is natural but do not accept less than 99.9% of uptime.
2. Speed
Search engine algorithms include parameters related to user experience. Speed is another factor in ranking when it comes to user experience. Users don’t like slow loading website and quickly go back and click on other site links. Google also said that speed is one of that 200 ranking factors included in the algorithm.
Site speed depends on many things like server response, page size, media size, number of request to servers, etc. you can optimize many of these things by yourself like decreasing the media size, reducing the server requests by combining some files, use of cache plugins. However, you can optimize the server response speed. or if your website is hosted on a shared server, then you cannot handle other website’s resource usage that is hosted on the same shared server.
The solution to this problem is to move on better reliable hosting provider and or getting a dedicated or at least VPS server for hosting your website.
3. Location of a server
It is a common rule of search engine that if any user from Uk searching for some information, the search engine will likely to show websites from that location. This works similar to the country level domains.
Now the question is how a search engine determines the location of the website. It uses some indicators like IP address of your website. The IP address assigned to your server is based on the location of that server like UK based server will get you a UK IP address. so if you want to rank better in UK region, hosting your website at UK based servers will more likely to give a little ranking boost when any user search your targeted keywords from UK location.
But, what when the user from India search for that keyword? it will show other that region relates sites on your website. It is possible to rank your website in other countries also but generally, you will get a bit negative ranking in other countries. You can solve this by selecting the server from where your most visitors are coming from. Simple!
These are some points you should take into consideration while selecting your hosting server.
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