I've been using free hosting 'till now, but, today I've listened to some SEO Audio book and the guy was stressing the idea of carefully choosing a paid web hosting... Is that true? Can a free web hosting affect my rankings? Thank you.
I rather doubt search engines can distinguish between free and paid hosting, unless you have forced ads at your site... Usually the are irrelevant, and that is where all the bad comes in.
Hi I've used in the past also a free web hosting and my site was never so good in the rankings as now. I think it's better to have a paid web hosting. Anyway, I'm very happy with it and I never will change again. Greetings Jason
Well as of SEO point on hosting the 2 prolems is LOcation and uptime free or paid that's not the mather
If the quality of service is lower, a server down from time to time, yes. Firstly you can lose backlinks, secondly if the server is down when the crawler comes, you could even disappear from indexes.
Search engines will not know if you on a free or paid account, the main factor that will directly affect SERPs is colocation (where the server is physically located)
Ranking has nothing to do with free or paid hosting. Some of the blogs on blogspot have good rankings. However, paid hosting is far better than free hosting.
If the free host (or any host) consistently has a lot of downtime, there will be various bad effects.
I've deleted one of my old website that I never used and it was indexed. The funny thing is that the website is still indexed and ranking for the keyword I selected. It is still there to this day. I think it really depends on google's algorithm. What we know about google's algorithm is only the basics.
Your site stability is the matter. Most of free web hosting cannot guarantee their uptime and security. What will happen if Googlebot visited your page and cannot crawl your page for many times and for a long time because - File has been deleted - site has been hacked - server is too much overloaded That's why paid web hosting can effect on your site ranking.
Well see this sub domain which is through free hosting provider. Great Love Story Search with that keyword in Google, You will see this site on billions of competition on 5th position of Google. This site rocks on manay mp3 related and love story related keywords. There is more than i have more than 100 keywords on which this site is coming in Google listing first 2 pages. So, Free hosting and Paid Hosting does not matter, as w3master said, every thing depends on two reasons, Uptime and Location of Hosting. Put more SEO efforts, you will get good rank. Best of Luck,