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Recently an interesting experiment was published on Reboot Online that says cheap hosting with low-quality, spammy bad neighborhoods of sites, can actually impact Google rankings. But John Mueller of Google disputed this study saying it is not really true and it doesn't work that way at Google.
Here is what the study concluded:
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).
John Mueller then chimed in on Twitter with numerous responses saying he doesn't think this is true. He said "I'm not aware of any ranking algorithm that would take IPs like that into account." He gave Blogger as an example. He also added that this study may be flawed a bit because "artificial websites like this are pretty much never indicative of any particular effect in normal Google Search."
The back and forth is interesting, let me share some of it:
Whoa - should be shared 1000x. Can cheap hosting w/ low-quality, spammy "bad neighborhoods" actually impact Google rankings?
— Cyrus (@CyrusShepard) September 18, 2020
"Long Term Shared Hosting Experiment" - Surprising new study+data from @rebootonline
Friends don't let friends buy shared hosting https://t.co/XAQHwgyG00 pic.twitter.com/2t6G3HfoyJ
Artificial websites like this are pretty much never indicative of any particular effect in normal Google Search. It's a cool experiment, a good write-up & analysis, and I love it when folks experiment like this, but it's not useful data.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 18, 2020
Host where it makes sense for you.
Are you saying that what works for made up keywords on artificial websites will work for a website in an active niche? That seems like quite a stretch. (Even aside from the technical aspects of "what is shared hosting anyway" -- AWS is shared hosting)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 18, 2020
I'm not aware of any ranking algorithm that would take IPs like that into account. Look at Blogger, there are great sites hosted there that do well (ignoring on-page limitations,etc), there are terrible sites hosted there. It's all the same infrastructure, the same IP addresses.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 18, 2020
There are many reasons to pick good hosting over cheap hosting, and having a good/fast/stable site w/happy users does reflect in ranking, but ranking shouldn't be the primary reason. That said, I'm super-supportive of testing like this even if I don't agree with all results.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 18, 2020
We have seen very rare cases of Google slapping all sites on a single host but that is super rare and rarely would ever happen. But this study says something more concerning.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
