Website Hosting and Google Rank - Issues and Concerns
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There are certain situations that can cause your site to take a hit in rankings. If the domain sharing your server and IP is penalized by Google on account of spamming then your website is also expected to be banned or penalized. This will happen if there is virtual shared IP hosting.
Another situation may arise if your website is residing on a server containing illegal adult content, and that site is on the black list of Google your website will be banned. While you should never assume that your site is blacklisted, you should also take precautions. Even if your site is dismissed from the rankings temporarily, you can probably clear up the mistake by contacting Google. Still to be on the safer side certain qualifications should be made clear while hiring a web host.
Hosts should be up 24/7. For proper website service it must be up 100% of the time so that users aren't faced with a blank page. Similarly, search engines have no specific schedules for crawling, so it must be up at all times in order to make search engines happy. If a Google-bot encounters a 404 error it will come again in the next crawl, so to be on the safe side ensure 100% uptime of your site.
All hosts must do maintenance tasks, but they should inform well in advance that for such and such period the site will be down due to maintenance so that you can plan accordingly. On the other hand, if your host doesn't inform you and you browse your site to see a 404 error then you must consider moving to another one. Google is believed to have a smaller crawl daily and a deep crawl once a month which implies that a Googlebot can come anytime, so your website must be ready to receive this welcome guest.
Web Hosting and Clean Records
The record of the host should be good at Google. Although there is no mechanism to rate them, web hosts that are very popular and extensively used could be trusted rather than unpopular ones.
Have a look at http://support.easystreet.com/abuse/banned_ip.html. For example, hypermart.com offers very good and reasonable packages of hosting for general as well as dedicated hosting, but a website hosted on it could face problems with optimizing at Altavista because this host service is banned by Altavista. Site hosted on the servers will miss the traffic coming from this popular search engine. But such cases are rare and in a nutshell look for the prominent and reputable names in this field.
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