Why the Google Penguin hates SEOs
Let me introduce you to our first guest post by Lewis Bassett. Lewis is already enjoying the benefits of hosting with us, and has some interesting thoughts to share with you regarding the recent Google Penguin updates (Penguin Update 3 was just released this month, so read on!).
Unless you live in cave, you’ve probably heard about the Google Penguin updates over the last few months.
Webmasters and Search Engine Optimisers (SEOs) around the world have been waking to find their websites relegated to page five of the Google search results – from the top of page one, almost over night.
If this happened to you, you’re probably wondering why.
Many of these websites are very well optimised. Yours was too. So what gives?
In my opinion, this seismic shift has been a long time coming. And the reason so many SEOs and webmasters are left confused is because most don’t understand how – or more importantly why – the Google search engine works.
WordPress plugins – the good, the bad and the ugly!
WordPress is a very powerful and mature platform. Even though it started life as a blog system, today thousands of customers use it to power their entire website – many on our managed Cloud VPS service which is an ideal wordpress hosting option (even if we do say so ourselves!).
Plugins play an essential part in increasing the flexibility of the system to do exactly what you need. As one of the success stories of open source software, one of the great things about WordPress is that anybody can write a plugin. So there are already thousands of plugins already written – there’s a good chance somebody already wrote the plugin you’re looking for.
But, as I said – literally anybody can write a plugin. You don’t need to be a great software developer, you don’t even need to pay any attention to the OWASP top ten web application security risks; anybody with any level of coding expertise and skill can write a plugin.
So there are thousands of pre-written plugins to choose from, to give your WordPress powered site the extra functionality or feature that you crave – what could possibly go wrong?
Benefits of tried & tested software versions
We’re often asked by customers why we’re running an old version of PHP or MySQL on our Cloud VPS services as they’re worried that they may be insecure or outdated, but rest assured this couldn’t be further from the truth!
We use extremely stable versions of enterprise software with many benefits over the latest available releases to ensure your web services are always available (and give you the option to change this if you wish!).
Plesk Mobile Server Monitor & Manager
Did you know that our Cloud VPS, Cloud VPS Extreme and Linux Dedicated servers all include Plesk Mobile Server Monitor for FREE? This cool new feature allows you to view the health of your Plesk server any time from your iPhone, Android or BlackBerry.
We also offer Plesk Mobile Server Manager as part of our Power Pack upgrade for just £5/month (UK hosting) or US$7.50/month (US/Singapore hosting) – simply contact our sales team to upgrade now!