Table of contents of the article:
If someone asked you to describe what SEO HOSTING means, how would you define it?
This was the question I began with in the Facebook group " FROM ZERO TO SEO ", seeking feedback from group members. We wanted to understand the level of awareness surrounding the mention of a term like SEO HOSTING, a term that is currently rather vague and confusing, with no clear definition, or at least not among professional SEOs who have made a significant contribution by answering this seemingly bizarre and out-of-place question.
The responses were quite varied, as you can see from these screenshots from which we have extracted the most significant ones, some in absolute harmony with each other, others in perfect and clear contrast.
Certainly, from these responses and other even more extremist ones , two "strands" of thought have emerged , both absolutely peaceful and legitimate.
The first one recognizes in SEO hosting some characteristics inherent to server-side optimization and therefore Hosting, and another school of thought says that SEO hosting simply does not exist because despite having certain technical characteristics, SEO is a separate and not directly related topic.
Which of the two lines of thought will be right? Which one will be right or in any case more just than the other?
Is it always all to be reduced to a marketing issue? Is it perhaps a new "blue stamp" to attach to the current banana to boldly state that all bananas are bananas but some bananas are more bananas than others?
What is the right yardstick by which to measure what is from what is not? Who decides what? In what ways, why?
SEO hosting: what does Google say about it? Exists?
Having had extremely contradictory answers, we thought it was extremely smart to Google what “SEO HOSTING” is and above all how the world has received and attributed meaning to this term.
Here is what we find if we search for "SEO HOSTING" worldwide.
In almost all the results on the front page, whether in English or in Italian, the term SEO HOSTING describes that service of using several different IPs for the creation of a Private Business Network (PBN) in order to create a link project artificial building at risk of being penalized and banned by Google.
SqueezeMind for example reports from its article in third place on Google: https://www.squeezemind.it/web-marketing/seo-hosting-cosa-sono-pro-e-contro/
WHAT ARE SEO HOSTINGS
SEO Hosting is nothing more than VPS or Dedicated Servers with multiple unique IP addresses associated with them . These services are offered by companies that understand this aspect of PBNs perfectly and, in fact, offer a wide range of IP address classes that can be associated with various domains.
In addition to the classes, it is also possible to choose the geographic membership of the address. Many hosting providers in fact allow the customer to choose between European, American, Asian IP addresses, in short, an intercontinental addressing market.
SeoHosting.com also says something similar as reported on their site for services aimed at PBN creators:
Here is the relative translation in Italian made with Google Translate:
For our part, the definition is right for how the word SEO Hosting is now interpreted, but attributing SEO Hosting to PBNs is in our opinion wrong, reductive and tends to obscure a very different concept and meaning that can be in the term.
Let's try to understand why they are all wrong in attributing a completely different meaning to a term that must mean something else.
SEO hosting: like pink unicorns or like chickens?
So it almost seems to witness a debate on pink unicorns, do they exist, do not exist, I have seen it or are they just urban legends?
In our opinion, talking about SEO Hosting is something much simpler and more similar to discussing organic eggs , that is, an adjective added to a product (in our case a service) that intends to encompass a very specific philosophy.
Organic in general (and not just for eggs) is achieved through production processes that involve DOING some things instead of others, or more precisely NOT DOING others . There is therefore a contrast between what OTHERS do and what ORGANIC producers do, and precisely for this reason the latter can affix an ORGANIC label, which, although it does not necessarily prove anything certain, at least indicates what is, or at least should be, behind that adjective ORGANIC, which in its own way enhances the product for those who can understand its meaning and the production processes that lie behind a very ordinary egg.
In the beginning it was SEO (or SEO).
To give a sensible answer and make intelligent ruminations about the existence or not of an SEO Hosting, we must necessarily return to the original SEO definition in order to understand how far we are from the primordial concept underlying any other consideration.
Directly from Wikipedia
“ The term search engine optimization ( SEO ) refers to all those activities aimed at improving the scanning, indexing and cataloging of a document present on a website by search engine crawlers ( such as Google , Yahoo !, Bing , Yandex , Baidu , etc. ) in order to improve (or maintain) the positioning in the SERPs (response pages to queries from web users). ”
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottimizzazione_(motori_di_ricerca)
The entry continues with this “schedule”:
SEO activities are many and can be divided into on-page (i.e. on the web page) and off-page (activities carried out on elements external to the site) and are based on a long list of ranking signals , called "SEO Factors".
Optimization stands out among the SEO activities:
- Server optimization
- Optimization of js and css
- Code string optimization and w3c validation
- the structure of the site and the navigation menu;
- textual content and images on the pages;
- of the link internal to the site;
- the usability of the site;
- the accessibility of information by crawler search engines;
- of the source code and structured data;
- of the backlink (links from external sites).
- Images;
We've highlighted in red all the areas that directly affect us as a hosting provider, confident that our work, always done to the best of our ability and with the utmost commitment, has brought excellent results to our clients, especially those who value all other areas, such as development, copywriting, and SEO. This has allowed us to bring real and tangible added value to the whole, while fully recognizing that even the best hosting can never work miracles if all the other skills required for a successful project are missing.
This is why we typically work with extremely successful, well-structured companies across all departments, rather than the improvised projects of aspiring businesses who see us as the path to success. Unfortunately, this isn't the case; we're the icing on the cake, but you have to put the cake on.
1. Server Optimization
The optimization of the server starts from the analysis of the requirements of the application that will immediately run and from the subsequent choice among the infinite technologies, suppliers, and hardware sizing.
Following is the choice of the operating system, software, installation and subsequent tuning in order to have the maximum return on investment and also the maximum performance with the lowest latencies.
It is possible to adopt an adequate configuration both at the Filesystem level and at the DBMS level by optimizing query cache, indexes at DB level, decide to use a Full Page Cache with Backend Memcached, rather than a REDIS object cache or a static Varnish cache or add some microcaching NGINX.
In short, if you think that you just need to install a Linux server and install cPanel or Plesk on it to have a performing hosting, you deserve to be on the tenth page on Google because you have no idea how many possibilities exist to have a server absolutely working.
To be clear, a standard web stack looks like the one below:
Ours instead is the following:
It is easy to understand that only for the number of software involved, the complexity is extremely greater but also the performances able to reach especially in a regime of high traffic and many concurrent accesses.
2. Optimization of JS and CSS
In wanting to address the second point of those highlighted in broken, some might think that it is enough to carry out the minification of JS and CSS to have an optimized hosting.
Too bad that there is not only minifization, merging into a single file, gzip compression (and the rarer brotli), but there is also asynchronous loading, above the fold, the generation of critical css to allow loading of the optimal resources and immediate rendering, eliminating annoying render blocking. There are really a sea of options on how to load JS and CSS and as absurd as it may seem, this step as well as managing it with extreme difficulty manually can be managed through special tools at the WebServer level.
3. Accessibility of information by search engine crawlers
It is obvious that the faster a site is, the more the crawlers of the various search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex will obtain the contents to be indexed in a shorter time. What is not clear to the masses is that there is a predefined time called crawling budget (or crawl budget) which is in simple terms the time that a search engine dedicates and spends to fetch content from your site.
More precisely:
Crawl budget is a parameter, or rather a value, that Google assigns to our site. Essentially, it's like a budget that Googlebot has available to crawl our site's pages. Using Search Console, you can understand how many files, pages, and images are downloaded and crawled by the search engine each day.
It goes without saying that the higher this value, the more important we are to the search engine itself. In practice, if every day Google scans and downloads many pages, it means that it wants our contents because they are considered of quality and value for the composition of its SERPs. (Source Seozoom.it)
But what happens when a site is slow for some reason and fails to deliver content to crawlers quickly? That crawlers go further and don't index all content.
Here, for example, is a graph from the Google Search console which shows how as the retrieval time of the content of the Google spiders increases, the indexed content decreases.
This creates a major drop in traffic and in some cases even the disappearance of important tools such as Google Discover and Google News. So it is easy to understand that having a fast server is not only for the benefit of the user and the user experience but also at the SEO level.
4. Performing images and formats
In addressing the last point we highlighted, it must be said that although the JPEG format has somewhat revolutionized the web thanks to its extremely high-performance and lightweight format with good detail compared to the heavier BMP and PNG formats, it is still not the best image format for the web. There is, however, the WebP format, which we discussed extensively in this article , which allows for a weight reduction of approximately 50% compared to the best WebP format, thus not only making the site lighter for end users but also ensuring a high Google PageSpeed score, which is therefore better, especially for mobile devices.
Moreover, it is not always and only a question of image format but also of size. Why on a smartphone for example should I download a 1920 x 1080 image designed for a Full HD desktop resolution rather than a 500px by 350px image with 4 times less weight?
Here too an SEO HOSTING is able to solve the problem by carrying out the rescaling of the image in automatic mode and thus guaranteeing an absolutely optimal speed.
Some frequent problems of improvised hosting
What has been written above might seem something absolutely innovative and exclusive, but it is not. We are not Einsteins, Nikola Tesla or Elon Musks, but we simply try to respect Google's guidelines exactly as any worker working in the web industry should do, be it a web engineer, a developer, a designer, a photographer. , an SEO.
It's obvious and completely normal that many hosting providers and developers decide to address the above points using different techniques and approaches. As long as everything works (and works well), there's no problem; there are no specific laws or obligations to achieve the common goal; the important thing is to achieve it correctly, without any collateral damage.
Unfortunately, however, this is not the case, and among the many problems we run into when trying to do the right things in the wrong way we have some of the following situations:
- Slow sites
- Sites that do not refresher content such as sitemaps and feeds or the homepage.
- Sites that do not show images on browsers that do not support webp such as Safari or Internet Explorer
- Breakdown of Javascript functionality
- Rendering error and layout breaks due to CSS issues
- Resource loading errors
It is clear that upon the occurrence of some of these often silent problems, not only will a site not be SEO Friendly and will not obtain advantages but it will easily collect so much penalties that it will disappear from the Google SERP.
Does SEO Hosting Exist or Doesn't Exist?
We leave the answer to you.
