How Poor Hosting Will Impact Your Rankings

A comprehensive search engine optimisation strategy is critical to maximising the online visibility of your website. You may have given thought to factors such as keyword research and image optimisation, but have you also considered your hosting?

Poor Quality Hosting Will Negatively Impact SEO

Poor hosting is often responsible for periods of downtime and if your website is down for more than a handful of days, Google will start taking steps to de-index your content from search engine results pages (SERPs).

This information was revealed during a Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout session by John Mueller who is the Search Advocate for Google. An SEO professional asked how to mitigate the impact on search rankings on a site that will be down for more than seven days.

The answer Mueller gave isn’t good news for site owners with less than ideal hosting. It simply isn’t possible for a website to be down for longer than a few days without search engine optimisation strategies and rankings being affected.

Are There Any Workarounds?

A 503 result code could help during downtime that won’t last longer than a day, however, if Google checks back and is met with the same 503 code, it will take this as a sign that the code is permanent and pages will be removed from the index.

So, it is safe to assume that the impact of site downtime will have repercussions that last far longer than the initial outage period. Content won’t be immediately re-indexed and a period of ranking fluctuations should be expected before they start to settle.

If an extended outage is likely, it may be possible to create a static version of the site to which to redirect users. However, Mueller still recommends that such outages should be minimised and ideally last no longer than a day.

More Reasons to Invest in Quality Hosting

Investing in the best hosting you can afford will have numerous benefits for your site, both now and long into the future. In addition to improved up-times, quality providers will help you to ensure that your site loads quickly, maintains a good IP reputation and is equipped with robust security features to keep your business and your customers safe.

The best hosting providers also provide access to automated site backups and offer excellent customer support that will help you to get back up and running as soon as possible if an issue arises.