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.