Is Bad-Neighborhood Affecting Your Blog Negatively

Surrounded by a bunch of bad men; people usually can’t accept you as a good man. Even though you’re one.

If your neighbors and neighborhood is bad it’s really difficult to prove yourself as a good person. Isn’t it?

But I’m not here to discuss about the offline neighborhood today. I will be telling you something about online-bad-neighborhood. If you’re a blog owner (self-hosted) or a webmaster please keep reading….

You must have heard Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs) telling like – “Change your hosting plan from a shared one to a dedicated one or VPS (Virtual Private Server). If you want to be a full-time blogger avoid bad neighborhood. Otherwise you will be in the bad eyes of Google, and finally loosing the rankings & traffic.”

So, what actually bad neighborhood is? When you’ve a blog or website on a shared hosting plan, the hosting provider usually puts so many (usually more than 100) other websites under one IP Address. And you never know what type of websites they are. They may be online drug peddlers, *****graphic sites, casinos and sites like credit card providers or insurance providers involved with unethical link building.

So you are surrounded by a group of spammy sites whose activities are considered as illegal by Google. And this is called bad neighborhood.

Ironically, there is still a misconception circulating between webmasters and bloggers that – as your site is hosted on an IP Address which shares the same with other unscrupulous webmasters; Google will penalize you. Or, your ranking will suffer in Google Search.

Broadly speaking there are 2 types of Google Penalties. Manual and algorithmic. A site suffers from manual penalty when a Google engineer finds some violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by actually analyzing the site. And webmasters are usually get notified of such type of penalty by Google in their webmaster tool. On the other hand, algorithmic penalties are machine generated. Penalties like Panda, Penguin, EMD, Top Heavy, etc. are algorithmic in nature and sites usually suffer from these types of penalties when Google rolls out or refresh such algorithms.

There is nothing like Bad Neighborhood penalty. And about ranking decrease – Google uses more than 200 signals in its ranking algorithms to ranks content in its search results. Although they’ve confirmed publicly about the number of signals they use; they’ve never told exactly what type of signals they are.

Check out the below video by Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web-spam team about Shared hosting Vs. Dedicated. Google clearly knows lot of bloggers & webmasters use shared hosting as it is economical. And they all are not spammy. There are great blogs with interesting & informative content. Unless and until you’re surrounded by 1,000s of **** Sites within a single IP address you don’t have to worry about it.

So, what does Google look for…

Instead of your hosting plan, Google gives more importance to the quality of content you publish on your blog. How interesting it is. How much user-engagement they are getting. How in-depth or well researched your content are. How trustworthy your blog is. How quality sites are linking your content. And how social media influencers are sharing your content. That’s matter the most.

Now look at this…

Recently I saw a leading blogger sharing his experience how he benefited by changing his hosting plan to VPS (no name please).

He was telling like “How his traffic almost doubled after switching to a new host.” If you look closely he is talking about traffic for the 2 weeks duration only. Where as the gestation period for Google to detect and rank a site on a new IP is around 1 1/2 to 2 months. Google usually takes some time to understand the site and its content before settling down for the final rankings in the search results. And in the initial period the site usually gets a boost…

2ndly – the number of visitors are not shown clearly in the image. And you can’t experiment with a small amount of traffic for accuracy.

Final Words: If you’ve an authoritative blog in your niche you shouldn’t worry about your hosting plan at all. Keep creating content which are absolutely different or unique from others. And you’re done!

To check your bad neighbors check out MyIPNeighbors.com here.