SEO Web Hosting Analysis (WARNING FOR ALL GoDaddy users ...)

chris · Joined: 16 Dec 2006 Posts: 2

Your web host may have a mayor influence on your web site ranking results in search engines. The majority of web sites are not indexed or get poor search engines rankings because of web hosting companies that focus on their own benefit and profits. You can see a list of the hosting companies that are most likely to offer non-professional grade hosting here.

The following are the most common shortcomings of hosting companies:

Your site got banned because your web host cloaks

Most of the large web hosting providers are changing the content under their client's domain if the client does not immediately upload a web site or if the site is removed from the domain for a period of time. When the page is requested by a search engine crawler, the requested page is redirected to a page that the web hosting provider has changed for their own benefit it typically contains links back to the web hosting provider's website or the websites of some of their other clients to increase their link popularity. Only the search engine robots can see the changed pages because the web host captures the search before it ever reaches your website by cloaking the URL, dynamically creating false web pages and then serving them up as if they were the actual pages hosted under this domain.

Why would my website be banned by the search engines?
Search engines penalize cloaking because cloaked web page do not return the same information as the page that was in the search engine ranking. It is considered spam and it doesn't matter how the cloaking occurs. When the search engine find out about it, your website could be dropped from their index. Obviously your web host could care less about you as a customer if it is engaged in this activity.

And 99% of domain owners will never know what happened.

But if you - like many website owners - put a great amount of time and effort into your website marketing by playing by the rules and following all the guidelines like optimizing and writing good content you want to avoid getting penalized at all costs. You do this to ward off the search engine ranking and SPAM police or you pay out lots of hard earned cash to have someone do it for you.

How you can tell if your Web Site got banned
Go to Google and do a search that will return the pages you want to check for your website in their search engine rankings. Click on the "cached" copy of the web page. The copy you will see is the same one as the Googlebot sees. Carefully check the pages for unknown links. If the content of the page is different than the one you published and contains links to websites you were unaware of, there's a good chance your web host has changed them.

What should you do if you discover your domain has been misused by your web hosting company?
Contact your web hosting company immediately and also notify Google of the problem. If you've proven that your web hosting provider has changed your web pages, get another web host ASAP.

Learn more about SEO hosting here Exclamation

dcz

Welcome

And thanks for the information's.

It's true cloaking is a major issue and that some crappy hosting companies do cloak their customers pages, but I am far from believing it's the number one cause for the majority of web site not being indexed and ranked properly.

Actually, I even think that hosting cloakers are far from being the majority, but the issue is important and the check you propose the right one to perform : compare your cached page's code with your actual ones and search for external links that could have been added.
But, you must take into account that in many occasion, the cache is not up to date, there is a delay.

For example, phpBB SEO home cache shows today :

chris · Joined: 16 Dec 2006 Posts: 2

Just check the huge amount of domains that the registrars (and hosting) companies hold locked [which should be illegal in the first place!]. Almost all of them hold them locked for a couple of weeks all-the-while they are cloaking.
Just as an example: [mod] One company [/mod] has 26,700 domains locked on one server (and has probably 10 more) and they are serving BS to the spiders.
They are basically burning through domains ..
I have seen as many as 270,000 domains under one IP being used like this.
You can easily confirm that by doing a reverse IP check on any expired domain.

dcz

Well, there is still a big difference between cloaking some User domain and keeping expired domains in domain parking's pages and such.

I as well do not like this much to see domains parked and kept by registrars just in the hope they could be sold with more profit one day.
But I don't think this is this bad, I mean, they do business in a business world.
For sure as per every type of business, there should be some rules and limits, but in most cases, you'll find people trying to earn money, and not even breaking a single law.
I personally do not expect things to be very different, it's just how it is. Everyone has the right to buy domains and to do whatever he likes with it, as long as lows are respected.

I do not consider expired domain parking to be this much of an horrible thing, even though I dislike it and would go away any hosting company who would do it, it's business.
What is not acceptable is if your hosting company does cloak your domain, and I again do not think this is the majority, very far from it.

Another thing to avoid is registrar buying the domains you've tried without buying them in the first place, but there is plenty of honest registrars and hosting companies.

As I cannot really verify your example, we'll continue this talking about the general case, which in the end allow to talk even more freely about the real problematics with hosting companies.

Our user do not really need company crappy names, but rather information about how to make sure the one they are using is a good one and to share the best ones.

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