Google bases their page rank for a particular website on how relevant it considers it to be for a specific keyword search. This means that many factors can determine how relevant your site is to visitors. If you use a shared hosting plan, the programming language that it supports and the bandwidth it provides will be crucial to visitor interest and accessibility, and indirectly to your page rank.
Modern programming languages will easily allow any necessary applications, texts and images to be created for any type of niche website. However, this does mean that if your site requires a specific programming language, the hosting plan that you use needs to support this language. A hosting plan that does not support all the features of a programming language can hurt your page rank if this incompatibility causes occasional browser errors.
Features
The first step in choosing a hosting company that will not cause any pagerank problems is to research all of its supported features. Your site needs a hosting plan that supports all of the programming code that it uses. This means the host you use needs to be able to understand and implement all the code for all of your site’s different web apps, since they are dependent on specific languages to run correctly.
The programming language that is used to create your website needs to generate clean URLs. Websites may see an increased page rank and elevated traffic from search engine rankings when clean code is used. On the other hand, poorly written code can lead to a penalized page ranking from Google and similar search engines, with decreased organic traffic as a result. Therefore, hosting companies that can properly run programming code that is optimized to improve page loading and caching is crucial for search engine optimization and high page ranks.
Load Time
Another major issue that can affect your page rank is the load time for your website. This means that whatever company handles your hosting needs to be reliable, with little or no downtime. Some hosting companies can be prone to server crashes that can lead to downtime for your website. Repeated downtime issues can cause reputation problems with your site visitors, a potentially serious problem in its own right. However, it can also cause major search engines to significantly drop your page rank, potentially negating your SEO efforts in favor of more reliable websites.
Location
The search results that Google and similar search engines create attempt to match keyword searches with relevant websites. For certain searches, this is partially done using the server location of your web host compared to the location of the person inputting the search query. Search engines are able to do this by using the IP address of the user and of your hosting company. For that reason, you may improve your site’s page rank for this type of search by using a dedicated hosting plan.
Simply creating a website and practicing good search engine optimization techniques is not always enough to maintain a high page rank for your site. If your rank continues to suffer for no discernible reason, you should consider the possibility that your hosting service could be at least partially responsible.
Author Bio:
Guest post contributed by Justin Epley, on behalf of WhoIsHostingThis.com – a webmaster tool that lets you discover which web hosting company any site is hosted with. They also publish web hosting reviews for all the popular hosts such as IX Hosting and Hostgator.