Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
- a large number of malware sites have been identified as being hosted with my hosting company.
- despite their promise of 100% up time, often that up time is not the fastest.
- they keep moving location because they are "such a great company they have too many servers now". This results in all my sites being offline for 4-6 hours 1-2 times year.
- they keep making changes ... but denying it. e.g. our server use to automatically redirect example.com/folder browers requests to example.com/folder/ -- then one day it just stopped doing that and the hosting company deny that any changes/updates were made to the server. Obviously, all the inbound links incorrectly written were suddenly returning 404s.
What factors that are controlled by your hosting company could cause your rankings to drop?
Obviously, the actual test we're looking to perform is to move hosting companies and give it 3-6 months to see if things get better. We have had bad rankings for 12-18 months now on Google and they just keep getting worse. We went from zero to hero on a number of sites from 2001-2008 but in the past year my hosting company has made some "financial common sense changes" (i.e. fired a bunch of people and cut some corners) and I'm wondering whether I'm barking up the wrong tree?
If you could please limit comments such as "check your title tags and keyword density" and other ranking factors as they are all discusses elsewhere. I'm looking to find a comprehensive list of things to check with my hosting company in relation to lost rankings - if such exists.
Thanks
Mike
Security and technical soundness all around can be important, too. There have been several reports of hosting companies accidentally blocking googlebot. But that would result in NO rankings, not lowered rankings.
I'd be mostly concerned with the lack of transparency - "100% uptime" and "the hosting company deny that any changes/updates were made" are not good signals to see.
What factors that are controlled by your hosting company could cause your rankings to drop?
You talked about a type of redirect that just stopped working. That's not necessarily something a hosting company controls - it might be, but that depends on what kind of service you have contracted for.
Either way, run away. Now!
Whether google penalises known malware hosts: maybe but they still display them even when the IPs and hosts are well known.
