Many fail to find the connection between web hosting and search engine optimization, however there is a very real association between the two. There are various aspects of your web hosting control panel, your web host’s policies, and the overall features of your hosting plan that contribute to the rise and fall of your rankings in the search engines. For example, your robots.txt file (which can be edited from the file manager in your hosting control panel) dictates whether or not search engines and other bots can browse your site. Some web hosts include an already modified robots.txt file which blocks search engines from visiting your site. Unfortunately, there have been many people who struggled for months on end only to find that their robots.txt file was not allowing search engines to index their site. This is just one example of the way a web hosting plan can affect your search engine ranking.
Site IP Addresses and Link Building
One of the most powerful ways to raise your site’s PR and search engine ranking is through link building, which is the practice of building backlinks to your site online. The more links you have pointing to your site, the more powerful your site appears to be to the search engines. Thus, many webmasters try to build links back to their own sites in a failed attempt to create what are known as link wheels. These are networks of self-owned sites that you have control over, through which you can dictate backlinking and the PR that results from those links.
Link Wheel Anonymity
However, search engines can see which IP address the links are hosted on, and if they are all on the same IP address, then this could negatively impact your site’s ranking. Of course there are other factors that come into play such as the number of outbound links on each page, and the PR of every page that links back to your site. The main issue is having control over sites that are located on different IP addresses.
Hostgator’s SEO Hosting
Luckily Host Gator is no dinosaur when it comes to search engine optimization, and they understand the eds of their clients. Thus, they have established SEO hosting, which gives you access to various C class IP addresses. This means you will be able to have many sites under your control which are hosted on various IP addresses. In other words, you will have control over a network of sites that appear to be unique entities. The plans offered by Host Gator’s SEO hosting are suitable for a wide range of site owners, with plans starting at only $35 per month for 5 C-class IP addresses. Of course each plan also includes a web hosting control panel and all of the other features you have come to know and love with your current hosting plan. If you are looking for a reliable web hosting plan then you can be sure that Host Gator can offer you everything you need with their new hosting company – SEO hosting.
