Comments on: Site Speed May Soon Affect Google Page Ranking

By: Whitby

Whitby — Thu, 20 May 2010 02:58:05 +0000

Does this mean that switiching my site over to a dedicated server from a shared server may increase its position in the serps?

By: Whitby

Whitby — Wed, 19 May 2010 21:58:05 +0000

Does this mean that switiching my site over to a dedicated server from a shared server may increase its position in the serps?

By: marckdon

marckdon — Wed, 05 May 2010 07:05:54 +0000

Google encourage poor contents when there are tons of good links pointed to it artificially.

I am really for high quality contents and beleive me I am frustrated when I see one of my unique high quality article ranking below poor content article, just because the webmaster pointed a couple hundred backlinks or more.

When you check e-commerce and see many comparative sites doing this, or competitors ranking better because they use stuffing keywords, doorway sites and sometime manipulate your own keyphrases to unrank you in SE.

I guess you just have to continue what you think is best for your site, and let go even if is frustrating.

my site: www.adnpost.com

By: Pete

Pete — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 04:51:55 +0000

Enhancing your site for speed to get a better ranking is like filling your gas tank and calling it fine tuning.

By: howtoblogformoney

howtoblogformoney — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:00:25 +0000

Improving user experience is a desirable goal both from Google’s and a site-owner’s perspective.
However, this move is weighed heavily in favor of the large site-owners, who have full-time webmasters working for them. These professionals can improve the code and manage the site.
For small site-owners, speed improvements may cost more, as they would have to increase server speed or hire coders to make changes which may be beyond their abilities.
The good news however is, that site speed will only be one of the 200-odd factors that Google already takes into consideration while ranking pages.
Hence, while site speed is both important and desirable from the user experience perspective, slow sites may still be able to rank high on Google, based on other factors.

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:25:35 +0000

I think a speed metric within Google’s indexing algorithm is a very positive thing.

It will encourage companies to think about speed and discourage them from using excessive amounts of 3rd party media such as poor performing adverts and flash based content, etc.

I’m sure the speed metric will only count as a small plus towards page ranking and content will always be the primary measure.

At http://www.getmecooking.com we are implementing features to make the site as fast as possible – much faster than other large cooking sites. See how fast the recipe page dynamically loads 20 recipes at a time. Other sites such as http://haystack.com also do this.

By: youfoundjake

youfoundjake — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:34:24 +0000

I listened to the interview, and Matt pointed out a couple of sites and Firefox plugins that can be used to look at site speed. What jumped out for me most was
““Alot of people within Google think that the web should be fast, it should be a good experience, and so its sort of fair to say if your a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus, or if you have really awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.””
A little bit of a bonus.. hmm, and he also mentioned that speed may be used as a metric for Google Adwords quality scoring..
Should be interesting on how this plays out..

By: Roger Ewing

Roger Ewing — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:08:37 +0000

I am always eager to hear about how Google looks at the world from the perspective of page ranking. But this is a pretty poor excuse for evaluating a site. Perhaps Matt Cutts is merely floating a “trial balloon”. How does Google know that speed is important over content?
Thanks for sharing.

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:53:45 +0000

I don’t think whether or not you’re using a CDN is going to be a huger factor or not. I don’t think it’ll hurt, but if you look at all the apps that measure website performance, most of them have 15-20 measurements and usually only one of those is related to CDN.

If you take tools like YSlow, Google Page Speed, or webpagetest.org and measure a site, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll find something you can improve. Many of the improvements are actually pretty simple, although some will require a new approach to development, and hopefully web designers will use the tools to improve the design process.

I’m quite excited about this. Google has the power to help change the web for the better. Ranking faster sites higher is a good first step, hopefully we’ll see this extended to rank sites with valid HTML higher too.

By: Ken Godskind

Ken Godskind — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:15:37 +0000

This is a really interesting development and an indication that Web app performance is of growing importance to users and the marketplace.

I wonder if Google will start off with the basic page load guidelines implemented for Google Adwords last year. Here is a link to the description of how that is currently utilized in Adwords: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?answer=93113

I read the original interview with Matt Cutts that is referred to and Matt suggests that Javascript may also be a part of the grading system which indicates client-side performance will also be evaluated.

Interesting developments that continue to point out that measurement from anything other than a real web-browser is ineffective.

Ken Godskind
http://blog.alertsite.com
@AlertSite_CSO