Can your host effect your positioning

[bizgen]

Hello everyone

First off I'd like to say that I only discovered Web Pro World a couple of months ago and I have to say that I have learnt more from reading the posts from all you regulars than I have from copious books and junk mail about seo - keep up the good work and a big thank you from a newbie to the industry.

My question - can your host and/or your package with them affect your search engine ratings for your domains. I ask because when I was doing this purely as an amateur I hosted sites on many free services like freeserve and freenet here in the UK. I achieved excellent search engine positioning, which eventually resulted in my selling one of my businesses with a very favourable outcome.

The downside with using these free hosting services are threefold 1) restricted functionality and space 2) many of them frown upon commercial sites and 3) I understand the search engines don't like them particularly if the word "free" is involved in the domain name.

Since then I have turned pro (cough - trying to) and now host both my and my clients sites with 1&1. I have the professional package and have created sub directories for each site and then pointed the domains to the root of each sub directory.

It's early days for these sites and I know my weakness with some of them is links feeding into the site and I'm working on that, but still after 2-3 months I would have expected better rankings (any rankings in some cases) than I have achieved. The free sites are still outperforming them by a long way.

I have optimised for the same keywords as before and have been carful not to duplicate any sites. The only commonaility is that they are all on the same package with 1&1. Any thoughts?

[jhusband]

I have heard that some search engines are no longer ranking some of the free hosting sites like geocities.com.

I use e3server.com for my hosting. Cheap and good tech support. I'm not even an affiliate!

-John

[greenkey]

I have also heard that free hosts do not get the same status as paid ones.
It may be something to do with the format of the domain name you use ie free.host/mysite
I dont think search engines like sites that are subdomains as much as 'real' domains. sorry I cant be more specific with references etc but have heard this many times in different forums and other sources. Of course the other thing to consider is if you pay for your hosting you have somebody to kick when things go wrong. I am always sceptical that free hosts don't try hard to fix problems when they occur. This cant be good if you are trying to run a business.

[matauri]

I have wondered along these lines also. There are quite a few servers out there lately that are blocked to many ISP's because of spam, security, content, etc. This is also why I think hosts are putting more restrictions on their members, to avoid such filtering. When I used external hosting last year, there were a few ISP's that blocked my site.

So, if sites can be filtered from ISP's because they run through a certain server, I've wondered if this can affects serps too?

[edhan]

I do think that it has a little effect. Hosting with free server are unlikely to get you good positioning nowadays since more spamming are being done with them. If your intention is doing business, it will be best to host your own domain rather than using free hosting.

Edward

[Dave Hawley]

I have yet to see any evidence of SE not including freely hosted sites? A Google search for: allinurl: geocities yeilds 25 million results.

SE's are in business of serving up relevant results. Should that relevant page be hosted on a free host, so what?

[Mel]

Originally Posted by greenkey

I have also heard that free hosts do not get the same status as paid ones.
It may be something to do with the format of the domain name you use ie free.host/mysite
I dont think search engines like sites that are subdomains as much as 'real' domains. sorry I cant be more specific with references etc but have heard this many times in different forums and other sources. Of course the other thing to consider is if you pay for your hosting you have somebody to kick when things go wrong. I am always sceptical that free hosts don't try hard to fix problems when they occur. This cant be good if you are trying to run a business.

I see no evidence of free hosted domains receiving lower rankings than other domains, in fact I feel that many of them are ranked higher than they should be. Check the backlinks on MSN for a geocities site and you will see something like 5 million links listed.

It is also not the case that subdomains are downgraded in the rankings. I see many subdomains that rank top 5 for competitive keywords.

[bpjcenterprises]

There are a lot of Unknown robots out there checking your Site out. I have had URLs listed that were never manually submited to any Search Engines.

[Dave Hawley]

I have had URLs listed that were never manually submited to any Search Engines.

Manually submitting to SE is largely a wasted effort. Many (perhaps all) of the big ones find sites via links from other pages on www.