- Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since your site was crawled last. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
- DNS Resolution – If there are any consistent DNS resolution issues while the crawler is trying to index the site, it may run into enough trouble to stop trying to index your site, and stop returning later to try again.
- Your web server should be configured to accept all requests for a domain whether they have the www or not. For example, non-www requests should be 301 redirected to the www domain.
- If you have a static IP for your site, ensure that the IP address resolves to the site. If it does not, this will cause problems as well
- To save time, many crawlers 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. If there are multiple sites on the same IP address, every other site hosted on that IP has the potential to negatively impact your search engine rankings, because the crawler will think that they are all the same.
I am sure these are just a very few of the server related issues that affect SEO. Are there any other server based issues that you have encountered that affect SEO positively or negatively? Leave me a comment and let me know.
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