Google’s Mueller on Shared Hosting and Ranking Impact

Google's Mueller disputed results of SEO study that found shared hosting negatively impacts rankings.

A recent SEO study set out to discover if there was a negative impact on ranking on sites that were on shared hosting. Google’s John Mueller offered his opinion of the test results. 

Research on Web Hosting and Ranking 

An SEO company India set out to do a long term study on whether shared hosting negatively affects rankings.

The study authors reveal they created the study from concern of “potentially harmful SEO effects” from shared hosting.:

“Concerned about the potentially harmful SEO effects that hosting a website on one of these shared hosting options could have on the websites of thousands of business owners, we decided to run a technical SEO experiment to find out what effect, if any, it had.”

 The idea they were testing is if low-cost hosting attracts low-quality websites that can negatively impact other sites hosted on the same server. 

The report authors suggest that Google could use the presence of spammy sites on a shared server as a negative quality signal because they were all in the same neighborhood.

So it appears that the authors are testing a hypothesis that is not based on any actual evidence or statement from Google. 

It’s just an opinion expressed without basis and, as you will see, it’s also based on a misinterpretation of what a “bad neighborhood” actually is. The article went viral on Twitter and Facebook, with many prominent SEOs promoting it.

Shared Host Study Methodology 

The study authors went to great lengths to shield their websites from any outside interference.

They assured that nothing affected the results of the study other than the natural events of releasing them all at the same time for indexing by Google. 

The methodology relied on an old research approach that uses a made-up keyword that has never previously existed online in print. The search term the created is the made-up artificial keyword, hegenestio.

Results of the Shared Host Research Study 

The results of the study confirmed their pre-existing hypothesis. They discovered that shared hosting can negatively affect search rankings. 

Study Authors Claim “Detrimental Effects” from Cheap Shared Hosting

“The results of this experiment suggests that cheap shared hosting options can in fact have a detrimental effect on the organic performance and rankings of the websites hosted there if your website ends up being hosted alongside lower-quality and potentially spammy ones (providing all websites being observed are otherwise on a level playing field).”

Study Authors Disavowed Their Own Findings? 

Curiously, while the study authors first say that shared hosting “can in fact have a detrimental effect on the organic performance and rankings,” they actually disavow the bold statements in a following paragraph by stating:

What’s going on, right? They first say that cheap shared hosting “in fact” can have a detrimental effect and then they say that the results “don’t show what effect” hosting will have in actual search results. 

It kind of sounds like they’re trying to sound the alarm that “cheap hosting” can wreck your rankings while also saying, well maybe not.

Report Claims Benefits of Dedicated Server & IP Address Then in a subsequent paragraph they seemingly contradict themselves again by asserting that the study does “show the effect the type of hosting you use” by writing:

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-shared-hosting-negative-ranking-impact/381612/

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