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. At Crystal Summit we do not add a robots.txt file to any hosting packages.

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.