According to a post on Google’s Blog today, the long rumored move to consider site speed in page ranking is officially in full effect.
We talked about this back in November of last year and now it seems Google has made it official.
Site speed will be a factor in site ranking
“””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.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.
If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site: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.””
Bottom line; if you want your site to rank well with Google, you better make sure your site is quick.
In full effect
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I believe it makes sense to consider the speed of a website in the ranking calculation, what goes does it do if the site has great content, but takes 10 minutes to load. If they consider the speed, the rankings should be changing according to countries/location of server and country/location of search request.
Yeah, Google have been saying this is going to happen for a while but even up to last week Cutts was playing down the possibility of speed becoming a ranking factor. Tools to identify the problem are useful and Google have made some available like ‘page speed’ is good, as is yslow.
However solutions are thin on the ground – my 2cents from my recent experience – if you’ve got deep pockets go for a website accelerator that automates all the stuff you need to do to make a webpage load fast – that way you don’t need to learn how to do it and add it to you workload right? Aptimize is the best website accelerator in class here – if you haven’t got deep pockets there are some free tools out there, I use a number of free plugins from wordpress. Either way its a learning curve but I must admit its satisfying to have a faster site.
Interesting. The speed thing has always been one of the cornerstones of Internet development. You have less than 3 sec to engage the user.
I’m glad Google decided to use it as a page quality filter.
Interesting article. Fast sites with poor content will have a better ranking. I would prefer good content over speed. There are too many unreliable sites out there. Thanks foe sharing the article.
On another note; any ideas how I can get into the Sedo auction? I have been rejected so many times while others are making it in with domains that hold no commercial or appraisal value.
I will never acquire a 3 character domain. Seems to be near impossible. Also, one word .com are also scarce. I do have some other
domaisn I feel that are defintely marketable. Thanks.
Site Speed as part of the algo was placed into good detail during SMX West a little while back. This video interview is a good one to watch if you want to learn more about Site Speed and Caffeine .
“Don’t Shave the Door Handles off your site. This is not a NASCAR race but rather place yourself in the shoes of the visitor and everything will be just fine.”
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5186826
I hope this finally kills off websites built entirely in one big Flash file. Probably won’t since Madison Avenue ad agency creatives continue to use Flash as a crutch for their mediocre creative these days…