Google

[wen]

I was wondering could I be Guilty by association just for hosting my site with a bad hosting company. Reason been after I moved my site from my previous hosting company my site went from # 3 at Google to 231?

[brian.mark]

In my experience, changing hosts means you drop when it first notices the change. Once it realizes this is permanent, the rankings usually come back.

Same if you transfer a domain name to a new owner, all rankings take a few months to come back.

[wen]

Thanks Brian.Mark but I been with this host for over a year now

[minstrel]

Originally Posted by brian.mark

In my experience, changing hosts means you drop when it first notices the change. Once it realizes this is permanent, the rankings usually come back.

That shouldn't happen, Brian. All that should be required is editin the nameserver info -- the change should be completely transparent to both human visitors and spiders and shouldn't affect SE rankings at all.

If you think about it, why would it? It's exactly the same site and you type in exactly the same url to get there...

[activeco]

Some people report drop in SERPS for exactly the same reason.
They are mostly using shared hosting, having the same IP address as some blacklisted sites.

[brian.mark]

When a domain name is sold or moved, many times that means new ownership, new content, and new rankings. At Search Engine Strategies I heard that Domain ownership and hosting changes set off a flag that says "This could be new, treat it as such".

How many times have you seen a new owner to a domain name keep the same content as was there before? I can't think of an example. What this does is causes a lot of people that were linking to the site before to drop the links. The question was asked of Google at that conference about "Re-Sandboxing", to which they denied there was a sandbox. In any event, I've seen those results quite a few times, so even though I agree it shouldn't happen, I can tell you it does.

If you've been with the new host for a year now, then it could be a problem with the host. Have you tried searching for any other sites hosted by them? Should be a simple matter to see if you're all getting some sort of penalty.

Brian.

[clasione]

Originally Posted by activeco

Some people report drop in SERPS for exactly the same reason.
They are mostly using shared hosting, having the same IP address as some blacklisted sites.

this is correct - you don't want to be on an IP block that has misbehaving sites...

This is the only negitive thing about being on a shared IP/hosting account....

The risks are there..

[wen]

Well not recording to Google, I send an email to Google and I asked them the same thing I asked at this forum this is what they told me.

“We realize these changes can be confusing. However, these processes are
completely automated and not indicative of wrong-doing or penalization of
individual sites. We currently include over eight billion pages in our
index, and it is certainly our intent to represent the content of the
internet fairly and accurately.
While we cannot guarantee that any page will consistently appear in our
index or appear with a particular rank, we do offer guidelines for
maintaining a 'crawler-friendly' site. You can find these guidelines at
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. Following these
recommendations may increase the likelihood that your site will show up
consistently in the Google search results.”

Now I don’t think I would like to believe what they tell me, the above message my be what they like the public to think they do, in other words the process is automated and with eight billion pages in their index is no way they can penalize or favor sites well I don’t know about that..some how every time I do a search at Google the big companies are on the top.
For example if you search for “Ice Cream Truck” at Google, for at list three pages all you get is anything but Ice Cream Truck sites and some how no mater what word or phrases you use ICE CEARM USA is #2 . Ice cream USA don’t have this phrase in their site they don’t have ice cream trucks and they don’t advertise that they do. I know this from the time we where looking for an ice cream for our annual company picnic.
So why is it the biggest search engine gives you this kind of results?
But you have to give them credit for one thing they sure have all of us running

[activeco]

Originally Posted by wen

For example if you search for “Ice Cream Truck” at Google, for at list three pages all you get is anything but Ice Cream Truck sites and some how no mater what word or phrases you use ICE CEARM USA is #2 . Ice cream USA don’t have this phrase in their site they don’t have ice cream trucks and they don’t advertise that they do. I know this from the time we where looking for an ice cream for our annual company picnic.
So why is it the biggest search engine gives you this kind of results?

Google gives a lot of credits to anchor text linking to another site. The site itself does not have to containt the phrase but the anchor text from another site(s) linking to it makes the linked site "authority" for the phrase.
This could be the case here.