Site Speed Web Search Ranking
Using site speed as a ranking factor has been on the back burner for some time with Google, but how many of you are aware that it is no longer a consideration, a possibility or even a rumour!
Yes that is correct my friends, Google has introduced it & made an announcement on the 9th April 2010.
What happened to the notion of websites providing a multi media experience..? Just think for a moment about how many images or videos you have on your website, in order to entertain your readers. If the infrastructure is not strong enough to support such media, then it is going to slow down your site, never mind how optimized your images & videos are.
Googles Announcement On Site Speed..!
Friday, April 09, 2010 at 11:00 AM
Webmaster Level: All
“ You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.“
So there we have it, what many of us hoped would not happen, has finally happened ! Hey no don’t get me wrong here, I am fully in favour of speeding up the internet, in fact I think everyone should have access to a lightning fast connection 24 hrs / day, what I am not in favour of however, is screwing the little guy to the wall while big businesses rake in the cash.
What Else Did Google Say..?
“ While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.“
Oh well that makes us all feel so much better eh..? No! I don’t think so, this is going to be the thin edge of the wedge for the following reasons;
1. English is the most used language throughout the world.
2. Google has the highest percentage of search share in the entire world.
3. It’s all well and good judging things on how they perform in the USA (Googles Home) but what of all the other countries that are still struggling to update their infrastructure to provide Internet connections in excess of 1mb..?
4. There are literally millions of people world wide that use poor quality Internet connections, this is not their fault & it certainly is not the fault of any webmaster trying his damnedest to earn a buck ! If all that is available to you is a mere 384Kb connection then what choice do you have..?
5. I wonder how many of the mere 1% that will be affected by this new ranking factor will actually reside in the USA or the more afluent parts of Western Europe..? You know, the sort of places where 4mb+ Internet connections are common place.
Really guys I could go on & on about this all day, but at the end of the day we are just little fish in a big pond full of sharks & how we feel counts for very little where Google, Bing & Yahoo are concerned.
Most of the would be webmasters throughout the world are probably using shared hosting, shared hosting is cheap, but as the name implies, resources are shared & this is what slows down your website. Yes there are a very small percentage of people that may not optimize their sites, but the vast majority of us learn what we can & try to do our best with our limited resources.
When all said & done, the only people that this will not affect are those that can afford to rent / lease a dedicated server eg. big buisnesses & rich people from the more affluent countries. The rest of us will struggle on and try to survive, whilst others try to take the meagre few dollars we earn, from our pockets !!!
What You Can Do To Speed Up Your Website
This is an assortment of tools available on the Internet, intended to try & help speed up your websites. They may or may not help to speed up your webpage loading times, but we have to start somewhere & if nothing else at least these tools may help to highlight areas of concern..?
- Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
- YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
- WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
- In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.
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Posted by Steve (Admin)
on Apr 11 2010. Filed under SEO Optimization.
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@ Imena, Yes true, speed is only one ranking factor, but that one factor could mean the difference between being on the bottom of page 1 or the top of page 2..? And I know where I would rather be!
Even though there may well be slow sites currently on Googles 1st page, I am sure that over time & after a lot of shuffling by Google, you are likely to see this change!
Site speed is only one ranking factor and there is many slow sites on first google pages !
Hi Tim,
Thanks for a quality comment !
Yes I have a sneaky feeling that there is more to this page speed nonsense than meets the eye, especially when you realise that the only browser rumoured not to be slowed down by Googles junk, is Google’s own Chrome! Can you think of any better way to boost an ailing browser..? hahaha
As you’ve pointed out in another post, Adsense slows down page loads. Maybe Google is too clever for their own good: as page load speeds increase in importance, people only making a few dollars a month from Adsense will ditch it. And I think the millions of sites that generate only a few dollars a month make up a large part of Google’s income.
I agree that most visitors don’t want to wait a minute for some page full of useless widgets and ad blocks to appear, but an industry average of 2 seconds? That’s ridiculous, especially as the US is Google’s main market and especially as the US ranks about 13th in the world for average internet speeds. A 2-second page load versus a 20-second page load won’t make much difference to someone using a low-speed internet connection.
You’re right-it’s not about visitors’ experience; it’s about tweaking the algorithm to favor the big boys.
(btw, great site: I’ve increased your time on site stats today
)
A strange statement Michelle..?
“A site with a lot of images and advertisements does not enhance user experience.”
Yes ok I will accept the point about adverts, but images..? I thought we now lived in a multi media world with streaming video etc..?
I can assure you that most people would rather look at a page with a decent amount of images, than just face a page full of text!
I have the stats from 2 of my other sites to prove this, the one with only 1 image per post gets on average 2 page views per visitor, whilst the other site with as many as 6 images per post gets on average 7.79 page views per visitor !
I mean if we are going to go back to the internet without images or video, then we all might as well dig out an old copy of Windows 3:1.
This is something I’ve been hoping would happen for a long time.
It’s in Google’s best interest to rank sites higher that make the user’s experience a priority. A site with a lot of images and advertisements does not enhance user experience. All things being equal I would prefer to visit a fast loading site versus a slow one when I search for something.
Yes Daniel, 4 seconds is a pretty good load time, but I wouldn’t get too complacent as the actual industry standard is half that amount at a mere 2 seconds ! This basically means that your blogs take twice as long to load as what the industry standard says
Many people are mad about this decision, but I always make my blogs load under 4 seconds, so I don`t think I`ll have any problems
Hi Chris,
Not wishing to douse your flames as it were
But all my sites are run on WordPress & whilst I would agree with you that it is a superb content management system, I would have to disagree with your statement that there is no need for concern over site speed!
This very site was being reported as taking 12 seconds to load a few weeks ago, but lots of long hours & hard work enabled me to get it down to a very respectable 2 seconds (dependant on time of day & location), which in case you are unaware, is the industry standard!
I have used webpagetest before and I must say, it is quite an impressive tool. Fortunately I don’t really have to worry to much about page load times because my blog is running on the fabulous wordpress content management system.