What Is SEO Hosting?You may have seen some hosting companies offering Search Engine Optimization hosting for a much higher cost than the regular hosting plans on their site. So what is it and why does it cost so much more? To understand SEO hosting you need to have a bit of background knowledge of SEO. Google sends the vast majority of traffic to all websites, so website owners are at the mercy of this search engine and try to do everything possible to make their site come up in the first position. A large part of SEO is trying to get links from other websites; the more links the higher your website is ranked. A few years back Google realized that it was being manipulated by some clever people who realized that they could just put hundreds of sites on a server and link them all together making it look like the sites were very popular. Google cracked down on this by looking at the IP address of each website and the IP address of the site it links to. In SEO circles it's generally agreed upon that if you are going to interlink your sites they should be on different c-class IP addresses to have any effect. If you choose a regular hosting account with unlimited add-on domains, all the domains will be on the same IP, so it's not useful from an SEO point of view. A web host that specializes in SEO hosting will have a large number of different c-class IP addresses available and when you add a new domain to your account it will be put on a completely different address. Now there are three things to bear in mind before buying SEO hosting: 1. This is considered blackhat SEO by Google since you are trying to manipulate their algorithm and if they find out they are likely to remove your sites from their index. 2. Google looks at more than just the IP address, they may look at the registrar of the domain and it doesn't take a rocket scientist (and Google is full of them) to figure out that if 50 domains registered from the same registrar on the same date with the same whois details then there is something fishy going on. Another point to consider is that SEO hosting generally costs far more than regular shared hosting because it's still quite a niche service. You can expect to pay 4 or 5 times the amount for SEO hosting than you might do for regular shared hosting. However, since SEO hosting is still quite new, it would pay to shop around as the prices can vary enormously. |
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