SEO hosting. Reality or urban legend?

If someone asked you to describe what SEO HOSTING means, how would you define it?

This was the question with which I began with the Facebook group "FROM ZERO TO SEO”Seeking feedback from group-goers. We wanted to understand what the degree of awareness would be if a word was named such as HOSTING SEO, a word to date rather empty and smoky without a unique interpretation or at least in the environment of SEO professionals who have made a great contribution by answering this apparently bizarre question and out of place.

The responses were quite mixed as you can read from these screens from which we have extrapolated the most significant, some in absolute harmony with each other, others in perfect and clear contrast.

Surely from these answers and others even more extremist Two "strands" of thought emerged, both absolutely peaceful and legitimate.

The first that recognizes in an SEO hosting the characteristics inherent to the server-side optimization and therefore Hosting, e another thread that says that an SEO hosting simply does not exist because even if it has certain technical characteristics, SEO is a disconnected topic and not directly connected.

Which of the two lines of thought will be right? Which one will be right or in any case more just than the other?

Is it always all to be reduced to a marketing issue? Is it perhaps a new "blue stamp" to attach to the current banana to boldly state that all bananas are bananas but some bananas are more bananas than others?

What is the right yardstick by which to measure what is from what is not? Who decides what? In what ways, why?

SEO hosting: what does Google say about it? Exists?

Having had extremely contradictory answers, we thought it was extremely smart to Google what “SEO HOSTING” is and above all how the world has received and attributed meaning to this term.

Here is what we find if we search for "SEO HOSTING" worldwide.

In almost all the results on the front page, whether in English or in Italian, the term SEO HOSTING describes that service of using several different IPs for the creation of a Private Business Network (PBN) in order to create a link project artificial building at risk of being penalized and banned by Google.

For example, SqueezeMind reports from its article in third place on Google: https://www.squeezemind.it/web-marketing/seo-hosting-cosa-sono-pro-e-contro/

WHAT ARE SEO HOSTINGS

SEO Hosting are nothing but gods VPS or Dedicated Servers which have several unique IP addresses associated with them. These services are offered by companies that are perfectly familiar with this aspect of PBNs and in fact offer a wide range of IP address classes associable to the various domains.

In addition to the classes, it is also possible to choose the geographic membership of the address. Many hosting providers in fact allow the customer to choose between European, American, Asian IP addresses, in short, an intercontinental addressing market.

Also SeoHosting.com says something like this as their PBN creator services site reports:

Here is the relative translation in Italian made with Google Translate:

For our part, the definition is right for how the word SEO Hosting is now interpreted, but attributing SEO Hosting to PBNs is in our opinion wrong, reductive and tends to obscure a very different concept and meaning that can be in the term.

Let's try to understand why they are all wrong in attributing a completely different meaning to a term that must mean something else.

SEO hosting: like pink unicorns or like chickens?

So it almost seems to witness a debate on pink unicorns, do they exist, do not exist, I have seen it or are they just urban legends?

In our opinion, talking about SEO Hosting is something much simpler and similar to discussing BIO eggs, that is an adjective added to a product (in our case a service) which intends to enclose a very specific philosophy.

BIO in general (and not only on eggs) is obtained with the production processes that involve DO things instead of others, or more precisely DO NOT DO others. There is therefore a contrast between what the OTHERS do and what the BIO producers do and precisely for this reason the latter can affix an BIO label, which although not necessarily able to prove anything certain, at least indicates what is there or at least there should be behind that adjective BIO which in its own way enhances the product for those who know how to understand its meaning and production processes that lie behind a banal egg.

In the beginning it was SEO (or SEO).

To give a sensible answer and make intelligent ruminations about the existence or not of an SEO Hosting, we must necessarily return to the original SEO definition in order to understand how far we are from the primordial concept underlying any other consideration.

Directly from Wikipedia

"With the term optimization for search engines (In English language Search Engine Optimization, in acronym SEO) means all those activities aimed at improving the scanning, indexing and cataloging of a document present in a website, by the crawler of the  search engine (such as eg Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Yandex, Baidu etc.) in order to improve (or maintain) the positioning in SERP (response pages to web users' queries)."

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottimizzazione_(motori_di_ricerca)

The entry continues with this “schedule”:

SEO activities are varied and can be divided into on page (i.e. on the web page) ed off page (activities carried out on elements external to the site) and are based on a long list of signals of ranking, called «SEO Factors».

Optimization stands out among the SEO activities:

• Server optimization
• Optimization of js and css
• Code string optimization and w3c validation
• the structure of the site and the navigation menu;
• textual content and images on the pages;
• of the  link internal to the site;
• the usability of the site;
• the accessibility of information by crawler search engines;
• of the source code and structured data;
• of the  backlink (links from external sites).
• Images;

We wanted to highlight in red all those points that concern us directly as hosting providers, certain that our work always done at best and with the utmost commitment has brought excellent results to our customers, especially those customers who valued all the other compartments, such as the development, copywriting, SEO and therefore have allowed us to bring real and tangible added value to the whole while well aware that even the best hosting will never work miracles if all other skills required in a successful project are missing.

This is the reason why we normally work with extreme satisfaction with successful and well-structured companies in all departments rather than improvised projects of aspiring businesses that see in us the way to success. Unfortunately this is not the case, we are the icing on the cake, but you have to put the cake.

1. Server Optimization

The optimization of the server starts from the analysis of the requirements of the application that will immediately run and from the subsequent choice among the infinite technologies, suppliers, and hardware sizing.

Following is the choice of the operating system, software, installation and subsequent tuning in order to have the maximum return on investment and also the maximum performance with the lowest latencies.

It is possible to adopt an adequate configuration both at the Filesystem level and at the DBMS level by optimizing query cache, indexes at DB level, decide to use a Full Page Cache with Backend Memcached, rather than a REDIS object cache or a static Varnish cache or add some microcaching NGINX.

In short, if you think that you just need to install a Linux server and install cPanel or Plesk on it to have a performing hosting, you deserve to be on the tenth page on Google because you have no idea how many possibilities exist to have a server absolutely working.

To be clear, a standard web stack looks like the one below:

Ours instead is the following: 

It is easy to understand that only for the number of software involved, the complexity is extremely greater but also the performances able to reach especially in a regime of high traffic and many concurrent accesses.

2. Optimization of JS and CSS

In wanting to address the second point of those highlighted in broken, some might think that it is enough to carry out the minification of JS and CSS to have an optimized hosting.

Too bad that there is not only minifization, merging into a single file, gzip compression (and the rarer brotli), but there is also asynchronous loading, above the fold, the generation of critical css to allow loading of the optimal resources and immediate rendering, eliminating annoying render blocking. There are really a sea of ​​options on how to load JS and CSS and as absurd as it may seem, this step as well as managing it with extreme difficulty manually can be managed through special tools at the WebServer level.

3. Accessibility of information by search engine crawlers

It is obvious that the faster a site is, the more the crawlers of the various search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex will obtain the contents to be indexed in a shorter time. What is not clear to the masses is that there is a predefined time called crawling budget (or crawl budget) which is in simple terms the time that a search engine dedicates and spends to fetch content from your site.

More precisely:

The crawl budget is a parameter, or rather a value, which Google assigns to our site. Basically it's just like a budget that Googlebot has available to scan the pages of our site. Through Search Console it is possible to understand how many files, pages and images are downloaded and scanned every day by the search engine.

It goes without saying that the higher this value, the more important we are to the search engine itself. In practice, if every day Google scans and downloads many pages, it means that it wants our contents because they are considered of quality and value for the composition of its SERPs. (Source Seozoom.it)

But what happens when a site is slow for some reason and fails to deliver content to crawlers quickly? That crawlers go further and don't index all content.

Here, for example, is a graph from the Google Search console which shows how as the retrieval time of the content of the Google spiders increases, the indexed content decreases.

This creates a major drop in traffic and in some cases even the disappearance of important tools such as Google Discover and Google News. So it is easy to understand that having a fast server is not only for the benefit of the user and the user experience but also at the SEO level.

4. Performing images and formats

In dealing with the last point that we have highlighted, it must be said that although the Jpeg format has somehow revolutionized the world of the web thanks to an extremely performing and light format with good detail compared to the heavier bmp and png, to date it does not turns out to be the best image format for the web. In fact, there is the webp format we have talked about in a rather exhaustive way in this article which allows you to save about 50% of weight compared to the best webp, thus making not only the site lighter for end users but also guaranteeing a high Google Pagespeed score and therefore better especially from a mobile point of view.

Moreover, it is not always and only a question of image format but also of size. Why on a smartphone for example should I download a 1920 x 1080 image designed for a Full HD desktop resolution rather than a 500px by 350px image with 4 times less weight?

Here too an SEO HOSTING is able to solve the problem by carrying out the rescaling of the image in automatic mode and thus guaranteeing an absolutely optimal speed.

Some frequent problems of improvised hosting

What has been written above might seem something absolutely innovative and exclusive, but it is not. We are not Einsteins, Nikola Tesla or Elon Musks, but we simply try to respect Google's guidelines exactly as any worker working in the web industry should do, be it a web engineer, a developer, a designer, a photographer. , an SEO.

It is undisputed and absolutely normal that therefore many hosting and many developers decide to go through the points above using different techniques and ways. As long as everything works (and well) there is no problem, there are no precise laws or obligations in achieving the common goal, the important thing is to achieve it correctly without any collateral damage.

Unfortunately, however, this is not the case, and among the many problems we run into when trying to do the right things in the wrong way we have some of the following situations:

1. Slow sites
2. Sites that do not refresher content such as sitemaps and feeds or the homepage.
3. Sites that do not show images on browsers that do not support webp such as Safari or Internet Explorer
4. Breakdown of Javascript functionality
5. Rendering error and layout breaks due to CSS issues
6. Resource loading errors

It is clear that upon the occurrence of some of these often silent problems, not only will a site not be SEO Friendly and will not obtain advantages but it will easily collect so much penalties that it will disappear from the Google SERP.

Does SEO Hosting Exist or Doesn't Exist?

We leave the answer to you.