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First part: We run a few Spanish magazines and currently have them hosted on a shared server. For one magazine, traffic has been building over the last four months to about 400,000 page impressions a month. We added a new magazine in August with about 100,000 page impressions a month. We've recently been noting very slow server response times and this has coincided with a drop off in rankings in Google.
Might these two things be related?
If Google tracks back button hits, could it be we're being devalued as a result?
Clearly, we have to change hosting providers, and I believe the time has come for a dedicated hosting solution. I think that in the next 12 months we might get in total to about 2 million impressions per month.
There are various providers in the Spanish market, but I've either already had a bad experience with them or have no information. Can anyone suggest a checklist of questions for a dedicated hosting provider that would separate the wheat from the chaff?
Well actually, here's a third part to the question: Our other alternative is to do what other larger publishers in Spain seem to do, which host with one of the more reputable providers in the UK, France or Germany. Surely their rankings will suffer, however, in the Spanish regional search engine versions. Right?
Also, it's commonly felt that GoogleBot only spends a certain amount of time on your site, and the amount depends on your PageRank. If GoogleBot isn't seeing all of your pages in any one crawl because of slow server response, though, I don't know whether that will affect rankings of already indexed pages. This is conjecture here, but it might (again depending on site architecture)... as if Google doesn't see all of your pages, it may not be crediting the PageRank distributed via the unvisited pages to the rest of your site. Again, this is just a guess. In any event, you need to get on an adequate server.
Our other alternative is to do what other larger publishers in Spain seem to do, which host with one of the more reputable providers in the UK, France or Germany. Surely their rankings will suffer, however, in the Spanish regional search engine versions. Right?
It's my understanding that if you satisfy the hosting or the country-specific domain requirement, that suffices, and that the other factors Google looks at include site language and where your inbound links are coming from. With a Spanish site on a Spainish domain, with most of your inbound links coming from Spain, I don't think UK hosting would be a problem.
Check the Euopean Search Engine Forum [webmasterworld.com] on WebmasterWorld for a more authoritative answer.
Robert, that's an interesting point you make about adding content faster than links. That must be difficult to measure however. Has anyone done the maths for this?
I'm still concerned about moving the hosting outside Spain. While one of the domains is a .es others are .com
Link building inside Spain is complicated - people don't seem to understand the value of sharing PR - so a good share of the links we get are foreign sourced.
Still, I'll take your advice and visit the Euro section.
Another alternative is to move the heavy stuff like images onto a powerful/reliable server elsewhere, and keep the pages here in Spain.
Robert, that's an interesting point you make about adding content faster than links. That must be difficult to measure however. Has anyone done the maths for this?
There are some PageRank calculation site around the web that might help you relate a hypothetical nav situation to PageRank distribution.
But a simplistic way to think about it is that if you have 10 content sections linking from your home page, and you increase the number to 20 without increasing inbound links, you've just cut the PR to your existing sections in half. (This is oversimplify things for the example, by ignoring other links on the page.)
I had always understood that a new page is assumed to have some intrinsic value that it can pass to other pages. I'll have a play with some of the calculators.
