John Mueller Shares The Truth About Shared Hosting And How It Affects Rankings

Efficient yet cheap SEO companies typically make use of low-cost, shared hosting for their websites, but a recent SEO study showed that doing so may hurt a website’s rankings. Google’s John Mueller gave a statement about the study’s results, allowing the best SEO companies to better understand how shared hosting actually works.

The study was focused on determining whether shared hosting can have a negative effect on a website's rankings. The main goal was to see if cheap, shared hosting attracts low-quality websites that could negatively affect the rankings of other sites on the same server.

The methodology was based on an old research approach, using an invented keyword that has never been used online. Their made-up search term for the study was the artificial keyword “hegenestio”.

Nevertheless, the authors of the study said the websites they used for the experiment were protected, and nothing could have influenced the results aside from Google’s natural way of indexing.

According to the results, the hypothesis was confirmed: Google may take the presence of lower-quality websites, such as PBN and spam sites, as a negative quality signal; thus, dragging down the rankings of the good websites on the same server.

The study went viral on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, with many renowned SEO practitioners promoting it. However, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller thinks otherwise.

Mueller said in a tweet that the research was not indicative of how Google actually ranks websites online. For one, he said that artificial websites or the invented keyword used in the research are not useful data, making the study flawed.

According to Mueller, made-up keywords and keyphrases are completely different from the real ones that the best SEO companies use for their websites. Invented keywords are non-existent, and will not make any sense to the search engine.

Google’s algorithms try to understand every keyword’s meaning, which means the search engine heavily relies on language whenever it ranks web pages. So, if a keyword was only fabricated, the algorithm obviously can’t rank the webpage just like it usually does.

In such cases, Google will need to use simple word matching as its last resort – which is not its standard method of ranking web pages.

When Mueller was challenged by another tweet to support his statement, he made it known that made-up keywords on artificial websites do not work for real websites in an active niche – that is simply not how Google’s ranking algorithm works. Mueller went on to say that he is unaware of any ranking algorithm today that would consider IPs like that when determining search rankings.

For example, Mueller mentioned Blogger, which hosts quality websites that have high rankings, as well as low-quality websites that rank poorly, despite all being on the same IP address.

Many webmasters and SEO experts have been using shared hosting for years, and doing so does not affect a website’s ability to rank.

The only downside of shared hosting is when a website starts to become very successful; shared servers can’t deal with sites that have very high levels of traffic. When it does happen, the high traffic will slow the whole server down.

In conclusion, shared hosting is perfect for websites that are just starting out and still do not have too much traffic. But once your website starts to grow, you may need to start getting the necessary server upgrades.

SEO is not a one-time thing. As your business website climbs up the rankings, you will need to work constantly to ensure that it stays on the first page of Google search results.

You certainly do not want all of your hard SEO work to go to waste, so it’s important to hire an efficient yet cheap SEO company to help you get the results you need without breaking the bank.

Here at Position1SEO, we offer many effective and affordable SEO packages that are guaranteed to grow your website’s online presence. Call us on 0141 846 0114 or send us an email at office@position1seo.co.uk for a free, in-depth SEO audit today!