Free Sites Versus Paid

I received a question from a recent reader that will probably affect many of you just starting out as there are so many different free alternatives to starting a start that many will be tempted down that route.

Here is the question

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I have a question concerning websites. Free websites versus hosted sites. I see that on google, hosted websites tend to rank better than free sites.

Why? I am imagining that the top ranking sites (hosted) have, of course, had more effort put into them. If they had put the same effort into a free website, would they have the same ranking? If they had the same in and outbound links, wouldn\’t they attain the same ranking? I don\’t look at the address to a website when I visit it. I just concentrate on the content. Isn\’t that what the SEO crawlers do too? Free websites are so much more easy to build and to control.

I understand there are limitations, and that they have some ads and such on them, but does it really make a huge difference to my success if I use a free website service? I could really use a straight answer to this.

Thanks for the help,

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and the answer

I agree with your observations regarding search engines. Free websites seem not to be ranked well by the search engines. A couple of years ago searches would have pages from free sites e.g blogger.com in the first 10 results but I can’t remember the last time I saw that.
It has always been the case that search engines didn’t treat free sites (sites with free domain names) as seriously as standard domain names, but now they almost seem to completely ignore them.
Therefore if you are building a serious site and want to be found by the search engines go for your own domain name and paid hosting.
If there is functionality on the free site that you really need but can’t do yourself, you can build the paid site and use it to promote the free site.