Is Shared Hosting Bad for your SEO?

Lately, it seems that everyone is writing articles about the hazards of shared hosting with regards to your SEO. For some reason, a lot of people are making the assumption that because there may be multiple users sharing the same resources, you just naturally are going to pay a price when it comes to search engine results.

But, why or how have they come up with this conclusion? I’ve yet to see any real solid evidence supporting this claim. Quite the contrary, my own experiences using shared hosting with many different web hosts has never resulted in bad SEO results. One article I read even referenced Matt Cutts’ statement that bad sites would not influence the results for other sites on the same shared server. Ah, but that was two years ago, it was pointed out. Surely since the search engines are ever-changing, there might be some bad effects from shared hosting these days. Well again, no specific examples were given to support this theory.

Now, it is often pointed out that speed is indeed one of the factors that influences search engine results. And, like I’ve said before, if you can afford dedicated hosting and need the additional power that comes with it, then by all means go for it.

But for me, shared hosting has proven to be very effective. Sure, there may be some web hosts that don’t do as good a job insulating all of their shared users from each other. However, purchasing a shared hosting plan from one of the established, highly-rated web hosting companies should prove to be not only adequate, but preferable for the majority of personal and small business website owners.