I have spent a fair bit of time working on SEO and inbound links on my site and i am happy with my work to date.

Now that my site has started to grow beyond the limits of my current package, i am looking to upgrade my account or most likely move hosting companies.

Firstly....
Does the hosting location have an impact on positioning within the SERP's ?

...if so, where is best for [IRL], [IRL & UK], [IRL & UK and US] ?

Secondly...
If i go ahead and move to another hosting company, will i see an effect of this move in my search results ?

Thanks in advance !

This has come up quite a bit recently. If you want to rank well in the SERPs for any particular country then the best bet is either:
1. host your site in that country, or
2. get a .tld fro that country (e.g. .ie for Ireland)

Now if you do both you might get a slightly greater boost in the SERPs (but I havn't seen any conclusive evidence of this yet). Of course it is possible to rank well across all SERPs (you can use mcdar if you want to see different results across Google datacenters).

Changing host should have no impact on your site providing:
1. you stay in the same geographic country location (of course changing to the right geographic location might have positive effects on your SERPs),
2. if on shared hosting you make sure that your not sharing server space with 'bad' domains (maybe get unique IP),
3. you keep the same domain name, directory structure and file names.

If you plan on changing anything in 3. baove then you would want to set up 301 redirects for any changed items.

Hope this helps.

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Thanks rgh !


I have been considering renting a box for all my sites - its seems far more economical in the long run.

If all my sites are on the one box [which i can say for sure there are no "bad" domains, assuming you mean pörn, file shares, dodgy downloads etc], then i should be ok ?

Will i still need a unique IP ?
If so, are they expensive/worth the money ?

If you get your own box then you will have a unique IP I presume.

How many sites, how much disk space and how much bandwidth do you use?

You can put all your sites in a shared hosting environment and just get a unique ip for your sites or each site. Sharing IPs can cause problems spam and getting blacklisted. There are also some serious implications for linking between the sites and SEO if they are all on one IP (or even different IPs but the same nameserver).

Dedicates servers are expensive comapred with a reseller account. If you have lots of dynamic and medium bandwidth sites then dedicated server may be way to go.

Blacknight is better equiped to give advice on hosting than me so maybe shoot him a PM.

Huh?

Have you _any_ evidence to back that up?

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Funny that you should ask

Absolutly NONE so discount it.

I have been trying to get this checked out for a couple of days because I simply couldn't believe that this was the case. Regret typing it now - I was going to put a disclaimer in there

And I just got a response about 2 minutes ago which seems to cast doubt on it but am waiting for clarification. It seems that the 'expert' who claimed that nugget got a bit confused about add-ons domains on Hostgator.

I go back to my usual disclaimer - SEO is 90% opionion and 10% fact.

Now I'm going to stand in the corner for a little while

Thanks rgh.
Dont beat yourself up over it.

The point is you are doing your best to help, and my point is ... that it is appreciated either way, so come out of that corner...

I would really appreciate experience from anyone who know...

If i were to move my website (and all new sites) to a shared hosting location [my own box rented from a hosting company], and i keep all of my content "clean", will this have an impact on my SEO work ?

Do i need a unique IP address for each site [or is the IP address associated with the box] ?

I would typically add a link like "Web Design by XXXX" or "Search Marketing by XXXX". Is this ok or not, in this setup ?

Is there anything else i should know about ?


Disclaimer: I havent a clue what i am talking about really.

If you get a dedicated server from a reliable company you will be able to get multiple IPs.

There are all sorts of theories about how many sites per IP are good / bad etc., for SEO, but being honest I can't say that I've seen any real evidence that can back it up.

Any server, regardless of how many IPs it has, will use its primary IP for sending mail. If you avoid dodgy hosting companies that are havens for spammers, sploggers and the general scum of the internet you should not have issues with email blacklists. The main thing is to ensure that your own clients don't get themselves blacklisted through their ignorance of email usage.

With regard to SEO....

The ccTLDs seem to be a route you can go down, though some people are seeing issues with Google's geoip results ie. a co.uk not appearing in SERPS as it isn't hosted on UK IP space.

Having said that - we (Blacknight) get a reasonable amount of business from the UK even though we've never targetted that market.

Regarding the links within your sites...

There are plenty of theories about this one.. Some people posit that by sharing links between your clients' sites and your own you create a "network" which some feel may be viewed negatively. However I know of some clients who do this and have gained plenty of business and Google PR from the links, so it can't always be negative.
Don't forget - if you are designing sites then people's choices of designer are based on a visual not simply a search engine result ie. if they come across a site they like they may want to know who did it and buy their services....

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Ok I can answer you pretty certainly that if all the sites share the same IP then you are not going to get as much weight attached to any links between the sites. I would go for unique IP's if it doesnt cost too much (~$1 per month per IP).

Avoid reciprocal linking if possible - one-way is better.

Hmm...still checking on DNS thing....in the corner

You do that.. We *may* let you out to play again later if you behave

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