A new blog post by Pierre Far on the Google Webmaster Blog talks about SEO advice for hosting companies.
The blog post goes through common hosting related issues Google spots, including ways for hosting providers recognize, diagnose, and fix these issues.
It covers:
- Blocking of Googlebot crawling
- Availability issues
- Invalid SSL certificates
- Wildcard DNS
- Misconfigured virtual hosting
- Content duplication through hosting-specific URLs
- Soft error pages
- Content modification and frames
- Spam and malware
The invalid SSL certs is one that I found somewhat new:
For SSL certificates to be valid for your website, they need to match the name of the site. Common problems include expired SSL certificates and servers misconfigured such that all websites on that server use the same certificate. Most web browsers will try warn users in these situations, and Google tries to alert webmasters of this issue by sending a message via Webmaster Tools. The fix for these problems is to make sure to use SSL certificates that are valid for all your website’s domains and subdomains your users will interact with.
Forum discussion at Google +.
