Faster, Faster!! Page Speed and How Your Site Ranks in Google
Filed under: Google, SEO — Tags: algorithm, Google, google algorithm change, google serps, SEO — Amye Saunders @ 5:16 pmThere is a lot of talk in the traps about website page speed. Google (via Matt Cutts and Webmaster Tools) has openly stated that page speed will be a factor into the ranking algorithm for 2010 and will likely roll out with Caffeine – faster the better and you’ll be rewarded for it.
Google Webmaster tools have been reporting sample data from sites that have page speed issues (you can find this in the Labs section under Site Performance). Within Google Webmaster it also suggests the supplied Page Speed Firefox plug-in (installs as part of Firebug) should be used to get more accurate and full data. This has been available since July 2009 so I guess we have had plenty of notice. This is already in play for AdWords where page speed will affect your quality score.
This tools reports in the order of priorities – which things are slowing the pages the most and also gives a suggested size savings if recommendations are carried out and, I mean, recommendations. It tells you specifically what files are problematic, which images should be attended to, which JavaScript files can be combined, which CSS definitions (within an include file) aren’t being used and can be excluded, DNS look-ups, browser caching and more.
Google introduced this idea of page speed officially in their blog in June 2009.
Not surprisingly it has been written up on many sites. Webpronews covered this in November 2009.
The goal here is to make the internet faster and improve the user experience. In turn, it is very likely that this will also improve traffic and conversions. Here’s an excerpt:
“If you’re serious about wanting your site to perform better in search engines, and you haven’t given much thought to load times and such, it’s time to readjust your way of thinking.”
Of course there is going to be debate about this within the industry, with marketers and developers. It’s just a new little layer to make our jobs a little more challenging.
At this stage the Caffeine update has yet to roll out. The last update Matt Cutts posted can be found here: Expect Caffeine after the holidays.
Here are some other sites to read up on this:
Google Page Speed Report Comes to Webmaster Tools
Site Speed Google’s Next Ranking Factor
Google Wants the Web to Function like a Magazine
WebPerformance Best Practices
Should Web Page Speed Influence Google PageRank?
Tags: algorithm, Google, google algorithm change, google serps, SEO
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Hi Amye
Is their anything coming out of Google about how they may or may not deal with latency when measuring page load speed?
Our sites are hosted in NZ it seems that if it is not taken into account our sites may get penalised?
Comment by Martyn — February 4, 2010 @ 6:13 am
Hi Martyn
That’s a very good question. First off I think it is important to note that Matt Cutt’s has tried to clarify this a bit. In a recent article Google Sets Record Straight on Page Speed as Ranking Factor the following was said:
Despite the fact that Cutts never said that page speed would become any more important of a ranking factor than anything else, many around the web and Blogosphere jumped to conclusions. While many more have remained sensible about the concept, not expecting page speed to trump relevant content, Cutts has now provided a video setting the record straight. The video is a response to the following user-submitted question:
Since we’re hearing a lot of talk about the implications of Page Speed, I wonder if Google still cares as much about relevancy? Or are recentness and page load time more important?
Matt’s answer is simply, “No. Relevancy is the most important. If you have two sites that are equally relevant (same backlinks…everything else is the same), you’d probably prefer the one that’s a little bit faster, so page speed can be an interesting theory to try out for a factor in scoring different websites. But absolutely, relevance is the primary component, and we have over 200 signals in our scoring to try to return the most relevant, the most useful, the most accurate search result that we can find. That’s not going to change.”
That being said, SEO by the Sea, had a very nice write up on this exact topic: Does Page Load Time influence SEO? in June 2009. This article does state patents from both Google and Yahoo where page speed and latency are discussed. An excerpt relating to the Yahoo patent:
The patent filing considers much more than just how quickly pages load into a browser, and it may influence more than just the rankings of pages.
It tells us about an information integration system that can be used with search engines, job portals, shopping search sites, travel search sites, RSS applications, and other types of pages, and how it might look at those in at least three different ways:
Access – How quickly it takes to access a page or other kind of document when sending a request to retrieve a page or document. Measuring access might mean looking at performance characteristics associated with a page such as server performance, and file performance. It might consider how quickly a page might load for visitors at different connection speeds, such as broadband and dialup. A search engine crawling program might simulate connections at different speeds to measure how quickly a page loads for visitors coming to a page through dialup or broadband connections.
At this stage page speed can be an influencing factor and that may also include latency. To what degree, remains to be seen. It is early days; however, as Matt Cutts stated, relevancy is still the most important factor.
Comment by Amye Saunders — February 4, 2010 @ 10:28 am