Do search engines give a ranking boost to sites with registered domain names against the free-hosted sites?
First, let’s make it clear that even a site with a registered domain name may be located on a free hosting server. Typically, free or cheap hosting plans don’t give you a dedicated IP address, so a lot of site names will translate to the same IP address. After the crash of the dot-com bubble, when domain name and hosting prices went down, sites on virtual domains became very popular because everybody could afford them. In those times webmasters believed that a bad neighborhood could affect their search engine rankings in case they used virtual domains on shared hosting plans. However, in the years 2003 and 2006 Google officials confirmed that “Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses” (see this in Matt Cutts’ blog). So search engines did not and do not apply any special ranking suppression algorithms that take into account a hosting type. Moreover, current technologies offer many more inexpensive hosting services types, suc
