Is Your Website in a Bad Neighbourhood?
In my last post I mentioned that being in a “bad neighbourhood” could affect your search engine rankings. Your neighbourhood is not only the websites you share links with but can also mean the websites you share hosting or an IP address with.
Dedicated hosting can be expensive so many of us use shared hosting, but who are you sharing with? If another website on your server has been banned by Google this can affect your site’s rankings or could even get your site banned. Sharing with websites that sell questionable products may also affect your site.
Shared hosting may also affect your website speed, if another site on the server is very busy it could use up your bandwidth and slow down your website.
Check who is sharing your server
If your website is sharing an IP address with hundreds of other sites than ask your hosting company to provide you with a dedicated IP address, there will probably be a small fee but it is well worth it.