In the world of the Internet there are literally thousands of web hosts. Some are vast server farms hosting millions of sites, some are specialist load-balancers for sites with huge traffic, others are hosting companies for specialist projects, and still more are web design companies offering tailored hosting to the needs of your own website.
There are lots of factors to consider when choosing a web hosting company, and search engine friendliness is one of them. If you have a vested interest in getting to the top of the natural listings, then the abilities of the web host come into play as well as the other options that the host offers. If you are looking for a new host, then Hannah’s excellent post How To Choose a Web Host may help you out!
Whilst your hosting isn’t the number one factor for search engine sucess, if you are a marketing manager with control of the website then organic search is definitely on your radar for something you want to improve and target, and the host you choose can have an effect on that.
Geolocation
First and foremost, you want to make sure that your website is hosted in the country in which you want to attract clients. This sounds extremely simple and obvious, but it is something that is often wrong on sites
that we take on. One of the largest hosting companies in the UK actually has its servers in Germany. If you pair hosting in Germany with a .com domain, then you can see why Googlebot and other search engine crawlers have a job to tell your site is aimed at UK customers.
Speed and Spidering
What other factors do we look at in ranking the search engine friendliness of a web hosting company? Well, the basic one is speed – and this is a factor for your visitors too – if the site responds slowly, then it inhibits the ability of crawlers to visit the pages of your site. The more pages they can reach, the better picture they will have of your site, and the more “fresh” pages will appear in the index. This improves discovery of new pages as it encourages the search spiders to visit more often and thus find your new updated content. Google in particular has a liking for new pages, giving them an initial boost when they first appear.
IP Address Issues
After that we start looking at the more "techy stuff" like IP addresses, platforms and URL rewrites. IP addresses is something we do look at, but less often than we used to. Due to spammy sites, at one time, the search engines might ban a site based on the IP address. However, with IP addresses becoming increasingly scarce resources, it has become more common for large hosts to have hundreds of sites hosted on the IP address. As this became more and more the case, search engines adapted, as they do all the time, and began discounting sites based on IP address. It’s easy to realise that banning lots of people because of one bad apple is not a good way to increase the quality of the engine. The algorithms were amended to be more sophisticated at finding the bad sites through other means, and less emphasis was placed on the IP address.
It is still possible to fall foul of the algorithm through your IP address, because the engines can (and do) look at the linking structure between sites, and if you own a large number of sites cross-linking to each other, which are all hosted on the same IP address, it is going to look like a deliberate attempt to influence rankings in a spammy way, and this is going to negatively impact your site’s ranking in organic searches. So if we feel that this might be a factor, it is something that we will investigate for you, although it isn’t something that
comes up often with our customers.
Server software and Rewrites
The platform is something else that we will look at. Whilst it doesn’t make any difference at all to the search engine whether it is hosted on Linux with Apache or Microsoft IIS or anything else for that matter, it makes a difference to us when remedying issues with your website. The most common ones that we investigate solutions for when search optimising a site are URL rewrites and multiple domains. URL rewrites tends to be more of an issue when your site is hosted using a content management system (and that could be a whole other blog entry!) but it is common for CMS and database driven sites to come up with unfriendly URLs. Thus you end up with e.g www.domain.com/products/shop.php?product_id=23 For both your website visitors and search engines it is much better if this web address is e.g. www.domain.com/dvd/lord-of-the-rings.html The second is gives you some lovely keywords in your URL for the search engines to see, and is much more accessible for the visitors, both when they see the result in a search engine results page and when they go to your site to look at or bookmark the page. There is an oft-repeated adage "Design your site for the visitors and not for search engines" and you can see from the examples here that the changes that Vertical Leap make generally benefit the site for visitors as well as search engines.
URL rewrites come in two major flavours, those for Unix servers, most of which run Apache, and those for Microsoft Internet Information Server machines. For SEO purposes, it’s relatively easy to modify Apache, given direct access to the server. A few mod_rewrite rules in the .htaccess file, and those ugly web addresses disappear. If we don’t have direct access, then a search friendly web host will make the changes for us. For IIS servers, it is a bit more of a headache. The solutions are there; both ISAPI Rewrite and IISRewrite can be used to modify the URLs. However, neither are standard installs at web hosting companies. Although they are minimal cost, it’s something that is installed at the server level, and can therefore be used to alter any of a web hosts hosted websites. So the choice to install it or not can be one that goes to quite a high level of the web host. SEO isn’t yet at a high enough awareness level for it to be a standard demanded by all customers, so those that do have it available are invaluable. It’s a good selling point for a web hosting company to use on their feature list for those who know, and an key component of the mix for us.
.htaccess is a very powerful file for the SEO expert: if access to this file is allowed by the web hosting company then it can also be used to solve duplicate content issues. The most common one is the infamous "canonical URL". Once again it uses the mod_rewrite ruleset in Apache. Canonical URLs are the result of something very simple – the fact that you want your visitors who type "www.domain.com" to end up in the same place as those who just type "domain.com". However the default way of doing this effectively creates two versions of your website, which search engines see separately. This creates duplicate content; which is not an ideal situation, and something which we as your SEO consultancy will aim to stamp out on your behalf whenever we discover it. We can also use this file for dealing with other domains than your main one, thus otherdomain.com should be redirected to domain.com to prevent the sites being seen as duplicates. If you have this issue, it is important also to have a permanent redirect (called a "301" in webmaster terms) rather than a temporary one (a "302"). Again with a search friendly webhost, implementing these rules is easily done, either directly or by request. For IIS servers, again, the ISAPI rewrite module needs to be installed to make this a simple optimisation task.
There are other ways of solving some of these duplicate content issues, but using rewrite rules is the "right" way to do it – the most simple and effective way to reach the required solution.
Other aspects of "search engine friendliness"
There are other aspects to search engine friendliness when we are looking at a web hosting company. These usually involve those hosts where we don’t have direct access by FTP. When you are doing SEO for a website, there are a few tools that are essential or at the very least make your life easier. And a lot of these need files uploaded to the website. One of the key ones is robots.txt which allows us to control what parts of the website a search engine can see. Others are the little "verification" files that are given to you by Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools; uploading these allows you to see a little more about the site from "behind the scenes", and can be invaluable when trying to track down particular ranking issues.
So in summary, for a web host to be search engine friendly, they mostly need to be ready to respond to the needs of you, their client. And if search engine friendliness is a desired benefit that you require then that is one that they should be seeking to provide for you. And if they can do it all swiftly and correctly then they are an extremely valuable part of the online marketing mix for your website.
Related posts:
