Each day during the week, I spend time pondering what reasons the Google giant might have to penalize or effectively demote certain sites in their index; Today I decided to take a walk down memory lane on the Waybackmachine searching for ideas on what signals Google may be using and what I may have done wrong within the past few years to deserve what the Panda updates have brought with them. It got me on to thinking a little bit deeper.
Well, Panda aside and focusing on the topic at hand: Could the network your site is hosted on have an effect, whether small or big, on your overall rankings on Google? Moreover, could that be an ingredient in the Panda recipe?
I've been renting servers at the same company for over 8 years now and truthfully, we've witnessed a lot of virtual (in the subnet sense) neighbours misbehaving and indeed emails sent from our server have been flagged as spam because of the network they've originated.
I can also look at the times where we've upgraded servers or moved our network to a different building or floor and seen a noticable difference in traffic levels over time, both positive and negative. I can trace this back to atleast 2003.
I'm not making any assumptions here, just putting it out there for discussion to find out whether anybody moving their servers to a different network (or renting servers elsewhere) has made any noticable changes to ranking or traffic levels over time.
I certainly do plan on testing this theory.
