With some servers, the only way to combat this is to set up a unique site for each alias and have the non-www alias 301 to the www domain. Sometimes that requires the appearance of 2 sites per domain on the web server. While most web hosts won’t agree to this, perhaps they can help you come up with a solution that will work for you.

Overloaded servers

Sometimes, when you perform a WHOIS lookup you will find hundreds and hundreds of sites hosted on a single IP.

While in many cases this isn’t an issue, you can still run into problems in the search engines.

This is because, to save time, many engines will cache the IP of a domain and simply request the domain by IP rather than a full DNS request each time it wishes to index the site.

That means, every other site hosted on that IP has the potential to negatively impact your search engine rankings.

This is because every site which is associated with that IP will by default be associated with your site, because of the common IP. If one of the sites has done something to spam the engine in the past, there is a chance that your site could suffer the consequences.

Go back to the example I gave earlier – a legitimate site sharing an IP with porn or gambling sites. I can almost guarantee you that the legitimate site will not rank competitively.

Consider it guilt by association. In this case the association is the sharing of an IP address.

While search engines are getting much smarter at identifying these types of things, some issues still arise. Therefore it’s safer to take precautions now.

If you do find such a site on your shared IP, you could always request that your site be moved to a new IP so that it doesn’t suffer the consequences of a penalized IP.

Another problem with overloaded hosts is that sometimes there is a site (or a few sites) which use so much of a servers resources that other sites suffer. If this is the case, then your site may not respond in a timely manner which means search engine crawlers could stop coming to the site and it will fall from the index.

Again, the solution here is to move to a different webserver or change hosting providers altogether.

As you may see, there could be many issues outside of the site itself which can affect search engine rankings.

The best way you can identify these issues is to become a web detective and perform a little searching of your own using WHOIS servers and PING commands to test out your site to make sure it resolves properly to the web host and IP it is supposed to.

Many times when you’ve ensured that there isn’t an issue on the site itself, then its likely a hosting issue.

And in some cases, you may be able to get these resolved quickly while others take a little longer. If you find its taking too long to get hosting issues solved, might I suggest shopping around for a new host? One that will treat you like a customer and not a number or pay check? That way you can ensure that your site receives the attention it deserves, and problems are dealt with quickly

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