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Google’s John Mueller once again warned about hosting your website on free subdomain hosting service because they are magnets for a "lot of spam & low-effort content."

You want to make sure to host your site on a server that is not overrun by spam and low-quality sites.

John said this on Reddit the other day but it was not the first time he said, this. He actually said it a number of times, such as don’t host on cheap TLDs, they can hurt your efforts and Google even targets whole TLDs sometimes.

John wrote on Reddit, "A free subdomain hosting service attracts a lot of spam & low-effort content."

His rationale:

It’s a lot of work to maintain a high quality bar for a website, which is hard to qualify if nobody’s getting paid to do that (and just generally tricky: do they throw people out if they don’t agree with the quality?). For you, this means you’re basically opening up shop on a site that’s filled with - potentially - problematic "flatmates". This makes it harder for search engines & co to understand the overall value of the site - is it just like the others, or does it stand out in a positive way? On a domain name of your own you stand on your own, with its pros and cons. (And with a domain of your own, I’d also watch out for the super-cheap TLDs, which come with similar hurdles.)

Here are other reasons why this guy’s site won’t rank well, outside of the cheap hosting.

* You’re publishing content on a topic that’s already been extremely well covered. There are sooo many sites out there which offer similar things. Why should search engines show yours? There’s sooo much competition out there, with people who have worked on their sites for more than a decade, many of them with professional web-oriented backgrounds. Yes, sometimes a "new take" on an "old topic" makes sense, but then I’d expect that users would recognize that and link to your site, even sending direct traffic.

* These things take time & work / promotion. Especially if it’s a new site (even if you had it on a good domain name of your own), getting indexed is one thing, but appearing in search results often just takes time, especially when there are alternative sites already.

Another thing to keep in mind is that search engines are just one part of the web. If you love making pages with content like this, and if you’re sure that it hits what other people are looking for, then I’d let others know about your site, and build up a community around it directly. Being visible in popular search results is not the first step to becoming a useful & popular web presence, and of course not all sites need to be popular.

This doesn’t mean you need to pay a fortune for your host. Just don’t go free.

Forum discussion at Reddit.

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