Hosting
Impact of your hosting on SEO
Although it may seem strange at first glance, the choice of your hosting can have repercussions on the SEO of your website. Actually, these impacts can be really bad as we will see later on.
Response time, availability and SEO
If you have a Google Search Console account, you have probably seen this kind of chart before :
Furthermore, in accordance with its Adwords service and its Quality Score's algorithm, Google takes into account your landing pages load time. As a result, we can assume two direct impacts on SEO:
- Robots won't waste their time with websites that are too slow and will less often come over.
- Google would slightly penalize websites that are too slow because they are likely to generate discontent among the users.
It is therefore recommended having an efficient server with strong availability. Many hosting providers contractually commit to availability rates higher than 99.9%. For the websites using large media, it is possible, for example, to host them on another server dedicated to this purpose.
HTTP headers and server configuration
The role of the HTTP headers is often neglected. Yet, a bag configuration can be the origin of many problems. It is necessary to check that the HTTP headers sent by your server are correct. Here are the different groups of headers:
| List of codes | Meaning of the response |
| 100-199 | Informational |
| 200-299 | Successful response |
| 300-399 | Redirects, which tell the browser another action is needed> |
| 400-499 | Client request incomplete |
| 500-599 | Server errors |
Hosting country and geo-tracking of the IP address
Here comes a point that has been the subject of many talks. To remain brief, the rule to remember is the following one:
It is better if your website is hosted in the country where the targeted users live.
In fact, if you have a site written in French, having backlinks from French websites, not being a .fr and hosted in the United States, it will be possible to find it on Google.fr and this, without any noticeable penalty.
How to geo-track my website in order to optimize the SEO?
There are multiple ways, more or less efficient, to make the search engines understand the country/language your website is targeting:
- Ranking the website through a ccTLD such as .fr or .de
- Obtaining backlinks from the targeted country
- Hosting the website in the target country
- Geo-tracking the IP (OVH offer this service, for example)
- Using Search Console Tools and designating the targeted country
Obviously, the strongest indicator for Google is the language of the content.
Next : HTTP Headers
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