SEO Hosting – Fact or Fiction?

There are a number of companies that offer what they call “SEO Hosting.” Actually though, “SEO hosting” is a misnomer (that’s a polite way of saying “useless advertising gimmick”), because any site hosted at any hosting company has just as much a chance to be ranked well within a search engine as a site hosted with an “SEO Hosting” company.

SEO in its purest form is about optimizing the content on your site so you are found to be relevant by a search engine. So unless these SEO Hosting companies are writing the content for your site, they have no control over how your site is ranked. In fact, as you review the sites of many of these SEO companies you will find that many of the items they list for SEO hosting are actually SEO tips that are completely unrelated to the hosting of your site (i.e. links to your site, unique content).

The one server-side feature that all of these companies tout as an SEO “feature” is providing your site with a unique IP address. While it can be handy to have a unique IP, it doesn’t really address the issue that they provide it for. All search engines look for patterns across the web. These patterns are used to help decide how to rank sites. One pattern that is examined is IP blocks used by sites that have been penalized for shady SEO practices, are SPAM in nature, or contain malware.

When such a pattern is detected, the search engine will penalize an entire IP block, deeming that IP block a “bad neighborhood.” So even though a unique IP is nice, if the whole IP block is penalized, that unique IP can do you much more harm than good. This is less a tip for good SEO ranking and more a tip to avoid penalties.

If you ask Google and other search engines about this, they will tell you that it is very rare that they have to actually penalize IP blocks in this manner. Normally they are penalizing dedicated servers or VPS servers where one person has hosted a number of bad sites in one place.

At Winhost, many of our customers do their own SEO for their sites, with excellent results for their desired search terms. They have developed their own unique content and have received relevant links to their sites without paying for the links (good SEO rule of thumb; never pay for links!). They have properly tagged their sites, created sitemaps, and use the webmaster tools provided by the search engines (Google,  Bing) to ensure that they can be crawled properly by the search engine bots. Doing these things—all of which are unrelated to the host or the server your site is on—will normally result in good SEO for your site.

Keep in mind that when a search engine does not rank your site well, it doesn’t mean that the search engine is making a mistake or penalizing you. What it typically means is that the search engine doesn’t currently find your site to be as relevant for a term as you may like. When this happens it is best to review your site and look for ways to improve the content, as “Content is King” when it comes to SEO. This is also where the above mentioned webmaster tools really come in handy. Search engines want to help you rank well for your terms and these tools are there to help you do this.

But there is no “magic bullet” to get your site a high search engine ranking, and—despite what they may tell you—there is no such thing as “SEO hosting.”