SEO Basics: An In-depth Discussion On SEO And Web Hosting

Have you heard the SEO buzz regarding web hosting? One school of thought that has been circling the Internet is that choosing a SEO optimized hosting provider will increase the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.

Quite frankly, I am having a bit of a problem with some of the information that is being circulated out there, so I am reserving judgment on this subject until better data is available.

For now, grab a cup of your favorite beverage and a comfy chair while we take an in-depth look at what is being said. At the end, hopefully you will have enough information to decide for yourself if investing in a “SEO Hosting Provider” is worthwhile for your business.

Let’s see if we can make some sense of this all.

SEO hosting is being promoted based on the idea that linking between sites will be discounted by search engine spiders and bots if they all resolve to the same IP address. In order to understand this better, we need to step back a bit.

Unless your company owns its own servers that are capable of providing your business with Internet hosting for your web sites and multiple IPs as well, you will be using a hosting provider. Of the plans offered by hosting providers, shared hosting plans are considered to be the primary choice for online business.

Shared Web Hosting Explained

When you sign up for shared web hosting with a hosting service provider, your primary domain and any additional domains or sub-domains that you are allowed to add to your account, all reside on the same physical server. That is, they share the space that has been allotted to you by your service provider. They also share the IP address of that server.

In addition, the space you are given is only a small part of the available space on that server. The remaining space may be shared by literally hundreds of other accounts in addition to yours. This is what allows hosting companies to make their shared hosting plans so affordable.

The key here as it pertains to our SEO discussion, is that all of the sites and domains that you have hosted with that hosting service provider will have the same IP address.

Why You Might Want A Dedicated IP For Your Shared Hosting Account

Some hosting providers will give you the option of having a dedicated IP address for your account for a small additional fee, rather than sharing an IP address with all of the other clients on the server that is assigned to you.

If you choose this option, all of the domains and sub-domains for your account will still share that same IP address, the only difference would be that no other accounts on that server would share it. From the SEO discussion stand point, there is no real difference.

So what would be the benefit then of paying an additional fee for a dedicated IP address? I checked out the support area at Hostmonster to find this out. According to what I found there, the benefits would include:

• Being able to use your own SSL certificate for a shopping cart, rather than sharing the free one provided by Hostmonster.
• If someone sharing your IP is blacklisted, a dedicated IP may get things back in order.
• If you are marketing to a country such as China that censors and blocks sites by IP, you would avoid being blocked due to the activities of someone else on a shared IP.
• Hostmonster only allows certain ports to be opened for a shared IP address. A dedicated IP would give greater flexibility in this area.
• If your site has processes that run for more than 5 minutes at a time, they will only work if you have a dedicated IP.

So there are some good reasons why someone might choose to add the expense of a dedicated IP address, but those reasons, other than possibly the one on blacklisting, have nothing really to do with SEO.

What Is Different About An Hosting Provider Promoted As An SEO Host?

Most of you will be familiar with Hostgator as it is one of the top shared hosting providers on the market and endorsed here at WBOBR as one of the TOP 3 WordPress Hosting providers.

Hostgator’s SEOHosting

Hostgator has setup another company called SEOHosting to handle requests for accounts with multiple IP addresses.

The least expensive plan option they provide includes what appears to be standard, but more restricted services when compared to those included in a shared hosting account provided by Hostgator, plus five Class C IP addresses. This plan, at the time this is being written, is available at a cost of $35.00 US per month.

The highest plan listed provides 125 Class C IP addresses at a cost of $543.75 US per month.

Let’s Do The Math

Sticking with the 5 IP scenario, I could duplicate this by opening accounts with 5 individual shared hosting providers. At an average cost of $10.00 US per month, I could interlink 5 sites that had separate IP addresses and I would be looking at a bill of $50.00 US per month.

Now I know there is hosting available at a cheaper rate than $10.00 US per month, I am only using this figure for comparison purposes. Continuing with this line of thought, if I had 125 sites to interlink, I would be looking at $1250.00 US per month rather than SEO Hosting’s $543.75 US per month plan. Or would I?

To make the above scenario necessary, one would have to assume that all 125 sites were in the same niche and closely related to one another and used to provide SEO interlinking between them to increase link authority. This is not as far fetched a notion as one might think as there are marketing plans out there that are based on the set up and interlinking of multiple sites in this manner.

The questions you need to ask are:

• is this is part of your own SEO strategy?
• is this method sensible in light of your own business plans?

If you are planning on setting up 125 sites to interlink, possibly it does make sense.

But, if you are planning on setting up 5 sites per niche in multiple niches, then would not having 5 hosting accounts on 5 different hosting servers accomplish the same thing? If this was the case, the monthly bill would remain at $50.00 US per month.

To Make This SEO Web Hosting Discussion Complete…

We also need to look at what the SEO experts have to say in regards to the SEO factors they feel are most pertinent when it comes to web hosting.

Top 5 Ranking Factors

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links
73% very high importance

2. External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links)
71% very high importance

3. Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains)
67% very high importance

4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
66% very high importance

5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.)
66% very high importance

Top 5 Negative Ranking Factors

1. Cloaking with Malicious/Manipulative Intent
68% very high importance

2. Link Acquisition from Known Link Brokers/Sellers
56% high importance

3. Links from the Page to Web Spam Sites/Pages
51% moderate importance

4. Cloaking by User Agent
51% moderate importance

5. Frequent Server Downtime & Site Inaccessibility
51% moderate importance

Based on these 10 ranking factors, you see that external link popularity from diversified sources with which your site has an arms-length relationship, is a considered to be of high importance and may sway opinion in favor of SEO web hosting.

Another factor you may not have considered is that the availability of your site and also its load time are very important in determining a site’s SEO rank as well. So, picking a hosting provider with high up times and tweaking your site to load quickly are equally important. This would apply regardless of if you were choosing a shared hosting provider or a SEO web hosting provider.

Some experts believe that search engine spiders and bots are not really able to tell, based on the IP address, if a site is yours or if it belongs to one of the other hundreds of site owners on your server. They contend that similarity in the contact information and possibly policy documents used on linking sites may provide a much more solid base on which to make a decision of this nature.

In reality, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that search engine spiders and bots could be comparing WhoIs information to domains owned by the same person. If we accept this argument, then we also have to consider that having a unique IP for each site would in no way effect the WhoIs information of the domains and thereby render the use of unique IPs as useless.

Furthermore, if we accept that search engine spiders and bots are able to pick out your sites from the hoard of sites sharing the same IP address, would they not also be able to identify a block of IPs owned by a SEO hosting service and pick your sites out in the same manner?

The goal search engines are trying to meet is to give the highest credit to incoming links from sites you do not own. We have to assume with the advancement in technology that they may quite possibly be able to spot an attempt to throw them off by using unique IP addresses.

We’ve covered a number of opinions and facts in the course of this in-depth discussion on SEO and web hosting and it will be up to each online business owner to accept or reject what has been discussed and go forward in a manner they feel is in the best interests for their own business.

This was a lot of material to get through and I thank you for sticking with me. For my part, the jury is still out and there is not enough concrete evidence to justify the added expense of SEO Hosting at this time.

I believe that the criteria for finding the best hosting for my business at the lowest cost continues to be a hosting provider that has high up-time, unlimited domains, email addresses, disk space and bandwidth and as I use WordPress extensively, one that provides WordPress friendly hosting.

I encourage you to read through the 2009 SEO Ranking Factors Report where 72 SEO experts were polled. This report is jam packed with SEO basics and information for your business and may help you decide if SEO web hosting is something your business would benefit from.

Your view point counts. Please add your comments on SEO hosting in the comment form below.

To Your Success,

SherryD
http://www.wbobr.com