Does Shared Web Hosting Affect Search Engine Rankings?

Web hosting and website maintenance can be compared to giving birth to a child and raising it respectively. Yes, that is how a website is taken care of these days. Every single website owner wants to rank his sites well. Ranking your website and finding the topmost spot (the front page of a search engine, usually Google’s front page) is not easy.

The quality and reliability of one’s web host is one of the most crucial factors of the whole theme. The golden rule for ranking your website well is to keep your site up and functioning all the time. Search engine crawlers, better known as spiders, might find it difficult to locate websites whose genuineness is not satisfactory. 

Shared Hosting and Its Effects

Hosting companies or individual web hosts tend to have a mixed clientele, better known as shared hosting. Not all clientele sharing your websites are genuine ones; they could be spamming sites too.  Search Engines like Google are smart and consider this a common phenomenon since it is difficult to have control over web hosts. In such cases there is no damage done to your site rankings. However, you will have to make sure that there aren’t as many as thousands of spam sites on the shared server. 

You can check for individuals sharing your IP address on bing.com. 

Transferring Host From One Place To Another

Transferring host from one place to another does not matter as long as you do it within your country. The domain name is going to be the same. Though the IP address changes, it still is in the same country. Hence, search engines generally recognize it. To be on the safer side, set the DNA time / TTL to 5 minutes. You may set the same time to websites on both locations and then change to the new DNS. 

Check to see if the Google bot visits all your pages. If this happens, then you can safely assume that the search engine has recognized your new IP address. 

In case you are unable to adjust your DNS time to a lower level, set the time for both locations to 24 hrs before you change to the fresh IP address. This way, your website would show no effect as a result of the change in IP address. 

Advantages Of Private IP Addresses 

Buying a private IP address on shared hosting will not burn your pocket. So it is not a bad idea to go for one. Some web hosting companies attract customers by offering private IP addresses for better SEO. When you have a private IP address, sharing the server with websites in foreign countries should be a safe option. You will not even be counted as a shared host. Such hosting companies popularly call this as SEO hosting. This kind of webhosting is expensive. 

There is always a doubt and dilemma over one point. Do web hosters really need a dedicated IP address or an SEO hosting package? The answer is simple. It all depends on how safe you want to be. According to the beliefs of many SEO experts, shared hosting does not impact the search engine ranking much. 

To sum up, there are several things you might have to do to stay by your search engine guidelines. It is very important to keep your site up and happening all round the year. However, the shared-web-hosting factor may not really make a big impact on the well being of your website. 

Here is the video what Matt Cutts have to say about shared hosting I.P effect on search engine ranking:

Author - Gagan Masoun is the owner of Blogs Daddy Blog.Gagan lives in India, has been blogging since 2010 and writing Blogs Daddy Blog since 2011.You can find him in the usual social networks.