The SHOCKING Truth About Shared Hosting & SEO Rankings (Real Experiment Results)

0:00This is a crazy SEO experiment because lots of websites are on shared hosting. So, first I'm going to read and show this experiment. If you're watching on YouTube, I'm showing results of the experiment, explaining it. It is really crazy. The outcome was really crazy. It's from a little bit back, but the outcome is still crazy. And it's a it's a contentious area in SEO. People debate this. You'll get it in a second. And then I'm going to give you tools to check this yourself. This is the shared hosting experiment, proving the bad neighborhood effect. It's from the 21 SEO experiments article from SEO Sherpa that I read all the time. And actually,

0:42the author of this is coming on the podcast next week. The author of this 20, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that I've been sharing this. I've been sharing this on and off. And this is actually the last experiment in this article which I've been sharing on and off for pretty much the last year. I think almost a year exactly. Took me a year to read these 21 experiments. And this last one is very startling. And then the author comes on next week. So I think it'll be great. But let me share this

1:09now. I'm going to get to it. Here we go. Shared hosting experiment proving the bad neighborhood effect. Debates about the impact of shared website hosting and its effect on rankings have raged in the SEO community for eons. These debates are not merely focused upon the performance aspect of shared hosting. For example, slow load times, which are generally agreed upon as having negative SEO implications, but a concept referred to as bad neighborhoods. Seriously, this will startle you at the end. This is startling unless you're not on on shared hosting. So bad neighborhoods described a hosting environment with a common IP address and a collection of lowquality unrelated penalized and/or potentially

1:53problematic websites for example gambling pills adult stuff like that. So your you are share your website is sharing an IP address with all of these lowquality sites. In the same way you could be negatively impacted if you link to or received links from spammy websites, many people believed, many SEOs believed that finding your website on the same server as a lowquality or unrelated sites could have similar rank crushing effects. This idea has substance. Google's own manual actions documentation states that all websites on a server could be penalized, quote unquote, penalized due to the reputation of some. And this is literally from Google's documentation. And Google says,

2:39"Okay, what if a significant fraction of sites hosted on your free web hosting service are spammy?" Well, Google tries to be precise when taking manual action related to spam. However, if a significant fraction of the pages on a given web hosting service are spammy, we may take manual action on the whole service. That is from Google's documentation itself. The link for this will be in the description for this episode. And so the explanation continues. It's also likely that Google's algorithms look for patterns amongst lowquality sites, and free/cheepshared hosting is potentially one of them. Let's be real. Are you more likely to find a throwaway PBN private

3:21blog network site on a cheap $10 a month shared hosting account or a premium $200 dedicated server? You get the point. To test the performance of shared hosting many which again many websites on one IP address versus dedicated hosting a single IP address for one website. Reboot a well-known digital marketing agency performed this SEO experiment. Here's the experiment. Reboot created 20 websites all on brand new.co.uk do domains and containing

3:54unique but similarly optimized content. All 20 websites targeted the same keyword and the keyword is headenstio which is a madeup word and as a result madeup word before the experiment it had zero results on Google. So all 20 of these websites some on shared hosting others with a single IP address they all targeted this same madeup keyword and again before the experiment this keyword had zero results on Google. So then they placed they placed 10 websites. This is what I was saying. 10 websites on dedicated AWS servers and 10 on shared servers. Some of which contained bad neighborhood sites like the best internet casino or or

4:42hotmails. Literally this is this is what these are the things that were on these shared servers. And then after indexing the websites, they monitored rankings over a threemonth period. And so to ensure that the experiment could not be biased by other factors, Reboot did the following. Ensured all domains had no previous content indexed by Google. Built all the websites with static HTML but varying CSS. Regularly measured each website's load time to ensure it was not an influencing factor. That's really smart because shared hosting can can be slower. So, it's it's great that they were monitoring that. Used status cake to check the uptime of the websites

5:25daily. Gave each website a basic similar metatitle and no meta description. These steps were put in place to demonstrate that speed, reliability, consistency, content code, and uptime of the websites did not impact rankings. So, what happened? By the end of the experiment, the results were clear and conclusive. Websites on a dedicated IP address ranked much better than those on a shared IP. In fact, by the end of the experiment, the top 10 results for the madeup keyword contained 80 to 90% websites on dedicated IPs. The results of this experiment evidently suggest that hosting your website on a shared hosting environment containing toxic and lowquality websites can have a

6:14detrimental effect on your organic performance. And this concludes in isolation shared hosting is a negative factor and if you are serious about your business a decent dedicated server is the way to go. Crazy experiment. Lots of people say, you know, this doesn't matter, but this experiment would suggest otherwise. To be fair, this is an older test. However, I've also seen many recent people like I've also seen

6:43people recently say this still matters. But then recently, I've also seen other people say this doesn't matter. But to be safe, if you have the bandwidth, using a dedicated IP address, much safer than using than using shared hosting. So, how do you check if you want to check this for yourself? Really easy. You can do it for free in 5 seconds.

7:04dnschecker.org to find your IP address. And then viewdns.info/reverseip to see what other websites you are sharing your IP address with. And hopefully what you see is none, no other ones, and it's just yours. That's how you can check right now for 5 seconds for free. If you are on shared hosting, should you worry about this? I think there are other things that are more pressing, that are more critical, such as making sure you're targeting your keywords correctly. Primary, secondary keyword, at least definitely have a primary keyword. You don't always need a secondary keyword. Making sure that your primary keyword is targeted in the beginning of the page title, in your URL

7:43slug, in in the H1, the the big top heading, and at the beginning of your first sentence. Those are the places where your target keyword should be. making sure that you're giving searchers, visitors to your site, what they want above the fold before they start scrolling, those things are super important. But if you're taking your SEO really seriously, this is something that at some point it's it's worth taking the

8:05time to to prepare and do this. Migrating to a new server, it doesn't have to be that difficult. You don't jump into the migration. You can actually have a very successful migration and it can be great. And I've seen I've seen lots of people say that they have migrated to a single IP address and it's been much better. They've had a lot more visibility. And I mean this test here, this test is just wild. It wasn't like 50/50 split. It wasn't like 6070. 80 to 90% of the websites, the top 10 results for the madeup keyword contained 80 to 90%

8:43websites on dedicated IP addresses. crazy experiment. And that is the last that is the last of these 21 SEO experiments that I love so much. I remember when I introduced this article I talked about the first time that I found it back when I was learning I was starting to learn SEO. This it's it's been updated every year. This 21 SEO experiments article. It's been updated every year. If it's the same one that I'm thinking of, I think it was published in like in 2014 or 2013. and it's a long time ago and it's been updated ever since. And I remember when I first found it, I found it at like

9:1911:00 p.m. or like 11:30 and I just read it into the middle of the night getting distracted going down rabbit holes being like, "Oh, what's this? What is this real? This can't be real. No way." When I when I found it and it's been updated since, it's always fascinating. And I'm so so excited to have the the author of

9:38this coming on the podcast next week. It's one of my favorite SEO articles ever with real experiments that show how Google's algorithm really works. Lots of other services and tools have based their algorithms on Google's algorithm. And when you understand Google's algorithm, it helps you understand other algorithms. And so this for me, this was so cool and so cool for me to read this to you. I'll probably reshare a bunch of these experiments in the future because they are so good. Like number one, the click-through click-through rate affects organic rankings. Like if you get more clicks in this in the search engine results pages then your rank gets higher

10:13and people have gamed that in the past. Ran Fishkin who came on this podcast game that himself and he and he talked about it he did it as an as an experiment. And if you want to learn SEO that actually converts, gets users, leads, all that fun stuff brings your business money. SEO that actually makes

10:29revenue, check out compact keywords.com. That's my 13 and 1 half hour SEO course. I spent a year making it super thorough, super in-depth. The only course, the only SEO course you will ever need. And it's not just how to rank. It's actually how to rank with people who actually who want to purchase, who want to, if you're a services business, talk to you on the

10:51phone. If you're an app, use your app. If you have a product, buy your product. And you are targeting these people who are cash in hand, who are ready to go right now. That's at compactkeywords.com. And that is all for this episode of the show. This is my daily digital marketing podcast. Do this thing every day, 693 days in a row doing this show. Thank you so much for watching. Hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much if you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you again

11:17tomorrow. Bino.