Recently i put up a website to sell my booklet. I put it up on a free hosting service called Weebly. Of course my url ends with .weebly.com
They gave me free website building tools, which were very easy to use, and it doesn’t look too bad i don’t think- but i don’t think it looks like a professionally designed website either. I also got a free domain name.
Now i am worried that the search engines may discriminate against my website just because it’s obviously a free website, and that they will discriminate against it no matter how much quality content i put on it, or how many quality links i have from other sites.
Weebly has an option to buy a domain name, which would take off the .weebly.com at the end of my website URL. And they also have an option to upgrade my account (forget what features i get with the upgraded account) which would make it that my website isn’t free anymore, but then again i don’t know if they are a ‘respected’ hosting service, so maybe the search engines will still discriminate against it?
Update:
I checked that website Private User gave me- the webtoolhub one- and put in my URL but i dont understand the results. It didnt tell me which IP it uses, just showed me a list of other websites. There weren’t that many- and all had a .weebly at the end.
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I don’t think so. I use Weebly myself and, in about a week, has dominated page 1 of Google for a not so competitive keyword of around 4700 advertiser-users.
Search engines are after information. If you have informative content and do some SEO, especially off-page as in article marketing, a free hosted website with a subdomain name works just fine.
In Web 2.0 platforms like Blogger and HubPages, some sites even outrank self-hosted ones. This is because the hosts are already popular and favored by search engines.
Search engines also take into account the nature of web hosting provider and the class of IP like (C class) on which a site runs.
Most of the free website providers run the free sites on C class IPs that are not quite good from SEO point so it may impact adversely but not up to great extent.
It also depends how many other sites run on that IP. The more will be the sites the lesser the chance to be liked by search engines.
Source(s): Check other site hosted on same IP : http://www.webtoolhub.com/tn561350-reverse-ip-doma…
Private User’s response is right on. Most of my client’s website are on IP A Class sites [not C Class] and are highly ranked on google.com. Understandably, there are exceptions to the rule, such as use of IP A Class redirection sites such as mydomain.com, homepages at aol.com, sbcglobalnetwork.com [att.com], etc.
Good luck!