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Today’s article

1. Do search engines give a ranking boost to sites with registered domain names against the free-hosted sites?

First, let’s make it clear that even a site with a registered domain name may be located on a free hosting server. Typically, free or cheap hosting plans don’t give you a dedicated IP address, so a lot of site names will translate to the same IP address.

After the crash of the dot-com bubble, when domain name and hosting prices went down, sites on virtual domains became very popular because everybody could afford them. In those times webmasters believed that a bad neighborhood could affect their search engine rankings in case they used virtual domains on shared hosting plans.

However, in the years 2003 and 2006 Google officials confirmed that “Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses” (see this in Matt Cutts’ blog).

So search engines did not and do not apply any special ranking suppression algorithms that take into account a hosting type. Moreover, current technologies offer many more inexpensive hosting services types, such as virtual private servers and cloud hosting.

After the Web 2.0 blogs almost replaced the Web 1.0 personal pages and hobby sites (tripod, geocities – do you remember those days? :) ) and user-generated content became even more valuable, search engines’ treatment of free hosted sites didn’t change – sites hosted by  wordress.com, blogger.com and other blog hosts rank well if a search engine finds their content relevant to a searcher’s query.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of reasons why you may want your own registered domain name, a dedicated IP address, and good quality hosting services (or even a dedicated server).

First, if you have an interesting project and you devote your time to it, you want visitors to respect your effort. Even a good site at www.somebodysdomain.com/yoursite.htm doesn’t seem serious, so once your project becomes more than a couple-of-hours-per-week hobby, you should find it a nice Web residence.

Second, a free host may add its own content to your site, for example, flashy ad blocks, interstitials, pop-ups, etc. Do you really want this experience for your visitors?

Third, free hosts do not care much about their availability 24/7, and high download speed. Even if you tolerate some mistakes, search engines don’t. You might hear that Google made high website download speed one of their positive ranking signals. So take also this information to account when choosing your host.

2. What criteria should you apply to a host when you select one?

First, think of the technology your site is built with and make sure your host will let you run your site successfully. Nearly every paid hosting plan supports PHP and MySQL, but not all free hosts do. VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting is a good solution for practically any webmaster, because by default they support most things a common site may want.

But if your site requires execution of programs written in less widespread languages such as Perl or Python, you should think of a dedicated server, where you will have full access and can set up anything you need.

Second, the amount of disk space and bandwidth and the number of email accounts, databases and FTP accounts offered are important, but these days in most cases they are more than enough for little money.

Third, try to test your host support’s response time.

Fourth, make sure your host is rated well by an independent and respected authority such as, for instance, Netcraft.

3. Do you recommend a separate domain name or a sub-domain on the main company domain for a new product?

In terms of rankings, both ideas are good. It depends only on you – whether you can take enough time to build and promote a new site. For many of us, publishing a new product’s information on a subdomain or in a separate site directory seems a better (time-saving and relatively effortless) solution.

4. Where should I post my articles to: my own site or a popular site belonging to someone else?

First of all, it depends on your goal. If you want to build an expert name and reputation, publishing your articles in popular newsletters and on topic-relevant highly-trafficked sites makes more sense. In addition, you can get a good link from such a site to your site which is a good link-building tactic.

However, if you are more interested in promoting your own site or blog, a better idea would be to post a full article on your own resource and place a short teaser (with a link to your article) in social networks and communities who share your interests. Read more about content sharing in Issue 29, of SEO MixTour -  Cross-Posting to Social Media.

SEO Companies’ Visibility Rate

Are SEO companies as good as they claim to be on their sites? Will they return the efficiency they promise? Are their skills qualified? The only way to find it out is to check how they optimize and promote their own sites.

Here we share Top 10 SEO Companies according to their search visibility rate for June 2010.

Click here to see the complete rate.

Web CEO analysts use objective evidence to rate SEO firms according to their search engine visibility. SEO companies’ visibility rate is calculated using a special formula that considers the positions of SEO companies’ sites in search engines results pages for the keywords their potential clients use, popularity of these keywords and number of competitors.

Learn more about the formula.

Here you can see how Top 10 SEO companies’ visibility rate has changed from April till June 2010.

Top 10 SEO Companies