How does Google rank sites which run on non-standard ports?
Matt's answer:
Here is a question from Greiner Thomas in Austria. Greiner asks “How does Google rank sites which run on a different port than the standard port 80? For example: ‘www.example.com:90/myplace’, and would ‘www.myplace.com’ rank higher than ‘www.example.com:90/myplace’?” > Well, I think, Google can handle nonstandard ports. If you look around, you can find for example: PayPal, we use the SSL version of PayPal rather than the HTTP version. That is because PayPal has done a good job of linking to the https, the secure version. So, we can index things on different ports, but it is nonstandard. Users don’t really understand it. They do not remember it as well. They are less likely to link to it. So, if it is at all possible, I would try to use port 80, so, you do not have to have :90 or :8000 or anything like that. >You know, websites are relatively cheap to set up. They are relatively cheap to host. So, rather than try to get users to remember all of that weirdness of doing things on a really strange nonstandard port, I would try to stay on a standard port if you can. It might not make that much difference in the search rankings, but users would probably not even click on it as much, because they do not know what those numbers mean or they are a little bit scared. So if you can, sort of, stay on the standard path a little bit, it would probably be a little bit better for your overall traffic, would be my guess.
by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team
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