Does your choice of host have an effect on your SEO and rankings?

Feb 2, 2010

In a word; yes, but don’t worry there are a few simple rules and if you get stuck, there is a fix.

Problems can be thrown up when users anywhere outside of the USA need to be found on their local version of Google.

As an example, to rank well on Google UK it is best practice to satisfy at least one of the following criteria:

Be hosted on a UK IP address.
Use a uk top level domain (TLD).

So if you have a .com or .net you will need to be hosted on a UK IP block. It is not just enough to use a UK host as sone of them aren’t all they seem.

1and1.co.uk for instance host their sites in Germany, so unless you have the UK TLD, you could be in trouble.

Google will normally manage to sort out the correct local version is correct, however, it can take time and it depends on things outside of the direct control of the webmaster or site owner. Therefore it has to remain best practice to ensure your host is actually hosting in the UK by using one of the online IP to location tools like the one available at http://www.ip2location.com/. Check the IP address of the name servers and a hosted site.

If you fall foul of geolocation problems, the best fix for this is to either move the site to a UK IP block or - second choice fix – to use Google’s Webmaster Central to set the geographic target audience.

A further factor to take into account is site speed. Google’s new update to the ranking algorithm known as the Caffeine update takes site speed into account as one of the many ranking factors so check a few sites hosted with your prospective host and run a few speed tests.

The last thing to consider is whether the hosting is shared or dedicated. For most users – me included – shared hosting is fine, however, there have been occasional problems when an IP address is shared with a known spammer or is subject to a denial of service attack. These are rare though, but it would be remiss of me not to mention it.