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About a month ago, WebProNews interviewed Google’s Matt Cutts, who suggested that page speed may soon become a ranking factor in the world’s most popular search engine. Speed has been a consistent theme with the company over the past year or so, with the release of various tools and announcements. It has become quite evident that Google places a great deal of importance on speeding up the web. With that in mind, it’s not hard to see why Cutts’ suggestion could soon become a reality. Google has always maintained that it is trying to deliver the best user experience, and by delivering results that load quickly users should get just that.
Do you think it’s a good idea for Google to use speed as a ranking factor? Share your thoughts here.
While many webmasters are embracing the notion of speed as a ranking factor as a welcome change, there are also plenty of people who do take issue with it for a variety of reasons. We’ve had some interesting comments from readers on the subject. Here are some of them:
So, we all have to pay for the most expensive hosting now or we won’t get found in search engines. I won’t be able to host on my own servers at work now. It went from paying for backlinks with huge advertising corporations to get sites PageRank up, Now we have to go with even bigger corporations that can afford to have a massive pipe connecting to the Internet. I don’t think Google mean to, but they are squeesing the poor people of the World out from search results and glorifying huge corporations – Be careful Google!
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Page speed is going to be a big political issue. Apart from concerns about net neutrality, what about countries who’s internet infrastructure is vastly inferior to the technology rich countries. Regions like south east asia and central china have much better connections than east africa. Even some parts of Scotland have poor internet links based on the ageing BT networks. Also the people who can afford dedicated servers and high quality bandwidth have a big advantage over the common Joe who has to rely on shared hosting. Does this make google less democratic? or are they just following what they think people want, ie faster loading sites?
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What do you think will happen to the sites that are mainly using rich media like video blogs? Can they really accelerate their load time? If not, are they doomed to drop from the SERP?
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The speed thing concerns me. Next to a tiered internet its the biggest slam agains the small time net player. Corporations will take over fast and knock out anyone who can’t afford a lightning fast server.
Those are just a few reader comments that were left on the video interview. You can read them all here. You can read quite a few more on this related article as well. Voice your own concerns here.
Regardless of how you feel about the possibility of Google using page speed as a ranking factor, it’s probably going to happen, and it’s something you’re more than likely going to have to deal with. Besides this even being a factor for regular organic results, consider Google’s recently introduced real-time results. The quicker Google can crawl you, the quicker you can potentially appear in this section.
As far as speeding up your site in general, Bill Hartzer recently shared a few tips on the subject in an interview with WebProNews:
And of course, Google has its own tips. The company offered a few on site performance improvement using its Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools has a Site Performance feature, which shows you a performance overview graph. This looks at the aggregated speed numbers for your site, based on the pages that were most frequently accessed by visitors who use the Google Toolbar and have the PageRank feature activated.
"By using data from Google Toolbar users, you don’t have to worry about us testing your site from a location that your users do not use," explains John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich. "For example, if your site is in Germany and all your users are in Germany, the chart will reflect the load time as seen in Germany. Similarly, if your users mostly use dial-up connections (or high-speed broadband), that would be reflected in these numbers as well. If only a few visitors of your site use the Google Toolbar, we may not be able to show this data in Webmaster Tools."
There is also a section that shows you some examples of pages and the average, aggregated load times that users observed while they were on your site. "These numbers may differ from what you see as they can come from a variety of different browsers, internet connections and locations. This list can help you to recognize pages which take longer than average to load — pages that slow your users down," says Mueller. "As the page load times are based on actual accesses made by your users, it’s possible that it includes pages which are disallowed from crawling. While Googlebot will not be able to crawl disallowed pages, they may be a significant part of your site’s user experience."
Google recommends that you watch the load times over a short period of time to see what’s stable, because you may see spikes here and there. If you consistently see high load times, that is probably representative of what most people see.
There is also a section that gives you Page Speed Suggestions. It gives you some example pages from your site and suggestions on how to optimize those specific pages. The suggestions are based on Google’s Page Speed Firefox/Firebug plug-in.
Google give more information on each of these features here.
Sites aren’t the only things Google places emphasis on speed with. Last week, Google launched a new extension for Chrome, which lets developers identify performance problems with their web apps too. The tool is called Speed Tracer, and it uses a "sluggishness graph" combined with other metrics to help users pinpoint the problems that are slowing their web apps down. You can read more on that here.
Are you worried that speed as a ranking factor may have a negative impact on your rankings? How do you plan to deal with it? Discuss here.
Related Articles:
> Google: Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010
> Google Tracks User Data to Monitor Load Times
> Google Introduces Page Speed Tool
> Google Wants the Web to Function Like a Magazine
> Google Provides Tool for Speeding Up Web Pages
The speed factor is really a good idea. I have found sites on the first page with google that take forever to load up. I usually end up closing it out and gonig to the next one in line. Why would web site owners complain about speed being a factor, people already pay thousands of dollars for other methods of ranking. Speed is really something that benifits everyone.
Wow! I’ve NEVER seen Google write so much detail as they did on their Google Code > Page Speed help page. I believe web page speed will be a very important factor.
I think basically this will kill several languages that are God awfully slow.
PHP for one.
Foxweb on the other hand is still blazing fast and you can write .htm pages as programs so that not even Google can tell what is static and what is not.
PHP isnt slow. Its actually quite fast – some of the largest websites in the world are written in it. Yahoo for example. You can also use PHP to use .htm extensions – in fact any extension. This definately wont kill PHP.
@Adsense Publisher – PHP isnt slow.
Theres no surprise here. Next Google will say “the biggest speed increase will be the DNS look up. Use ours.” The biggest speed hump is most users computer/browser/internet setup. I know people at work whose wireless continually drops in and out. They dont seem to mind that much.
Its hypocritcal tho as I find the slowest thing on my websites is the loading of google analytics code.
Google again is trying to shape the internet into how they think it should work. First they drive everyone into a PageRank / inbound link frenzy and now this.
With the personalized search coming to the fore-front, it is being said that SEO is evolving and rankings are dead. So how come speeding up the website may become a ranking factor and what’s the use of attaching so much importance to it?
No….I think this shouldn’t be done and I agree if it becomes a factor then webmasters who cannot spend much on their websites will be in trouble. That means if you can afford expensive hosting then only you can get rankings and they dump website’s quality and popularity.
A slow loading webpage is bad for the site owner period. Although the majority of end-users in the UK have broadband now, a fast page load is a bread and butter issue that all web designers, hosting companies, seo consultants and web developers should keep in mind.
Speed is not relevant in a search for ‘secondhand iPod’…or whatever…please correct me if I am wrong.
It’s about Google generating revenue. Speed is not an issue. Google is testing on a 56k modem. Who uses dial up in this day and age? Google has jumped the shark. A small shark…
Speed is wonderful and I would always consider it important. However, when page content is overlooked because people are always in a hurry, this makes a site less desirable???? CONTENT IS KING. Speed does not work on sites that have important information and messages. Google must decide whether their rules will lower the value of special information sites. The ultimate result of too much speed is less knowledge regarding vital and valuable issues.
Look at this from the USER perspective. I want, say a polo shirt. I would like it if Google served me relevant results that DID NOT send me to a page with a 5 minute Flash intro load time!!! I am sick of clicking on BOZO sites that think the user wants to be entertained! I want to find the ITEM I want and FAST, and I don’t want to endure long load times to get it!
Serving me the fastest, relevant site gets my job done faster, my shopping done quicker, and my research done easier
GO GOOGLE GO!
@ In Favor,
I agree with the 5 minute page loads, but what Google are doing is putting a site that loads in 4 seconds at the top of the serps and the pages that load in 8 secs below it.
As has been said above, the big guys who have enough money for the biggest pipes and servers are thinking it is wonderful and the small guy suffers.
So much for tracking as that takes 3 secs or so to load.
Just another way, Google is pushing out the little guy and opening it’s door to the big boys.
I am really starting to see how the Native American Indians and Australian Aboriginals felt when the foreigners landed on the shore with smiles as big as a cheshire cat, got what they needed from the small guys and then took over with there might.
Pretty soon, I see a the little guy going to bing and yahoo and Google will just deal with the big boys… and they damn well know what they are doing too.. Google can Go to hell.
All internet Marketers let’s boycott the big G..
I think the speed factor is a good idea
There is nothing wrong with Google taking Speed as a measure and perhaps showing us the speed on the search returns as an informational tool as is for example their raking level or something but to penalize a site for not being fast is wrong. It should not affect the level of ranking for the site. Let the consumer make their own mind on what is acceptable to them. Sure tell them you consider it slow if you want but do not decrease its ranking because it is.
Google we need you to provide relevant information not to make decisions for us. If a site is slow (say your own Youtube.com on certain times of the day) it is up to me to gauge if i want to engage with it or not. If you rank it lower because it is slow I may never find a site that otherwise has great content, perhaps even better content or more relevant content for my search which I need more than the faster ones that cut corner just to be faster. I work with http://jcpaparazzi.com for example and it basically a paparazzi site with a great deal of high quality images, they are kept weighty to provide a good quality for the fans, it will naturally be slower than the competitors that compress the images a great deal but it provides a better visual experience and worth more to our fans. The fans come to see photos so they do not mind. Why would Google want to penalize a higher quality site because it is slower? Let me decide if I want to view slower higher quality photos or faster bleached out and smaller photos, just give me the natural results based on content which is why I use you. Give me all the information you want that might be good to know including speed of the site if you want but give me content relevance first.
I do not need Google to be my parent and tell me what is better for me because of its preference, give me what I am looking for and I will let my mouse do my talking by clicking away if I do not like it but at least I made the decision not Google and it gave me the service I went to it for, that site was higher because it was more relevant based on content not artificial measures of fanatical optimization geekdom.
Speeding up the web is all relative to the content that a person is looking for. Say you want to watch America Idol reruns, multimedia sites are slower to load than pages filled with words, so does that mean that a site that is ranking number one for American idol reruns should be bumped down..no!
I would like to point something out…
Yahoo directory listings are valuable and perhaps always will be for one reason, they are a real human controlled directory not allowing trash. Perhaps Google should offer a FLAG link on google search results and in their toolbar and then look at the sites that get flagged and decide what to do, you need people at Google to look because competitors will start flagging left and right and Google would need a white-list.
Google wake up, you need to get more involved in your search engine, all automation is not good, all automated customer support sucks, all unmoderated blogs become ridiculous. Everything needs to be done with dose reasonably.
some quick examples, you search disney vacation, you get a page
http://disneyland.disney.go.com/disneyland/en_US/reserve/listing?name=PackagesListingPage&bhcp=1
this page does have a slower load time, doesnt mean its not the most relevant, so google would bump down this page because some affiliate has a website that loads quicker with one image?
I think RELEVANCE should always be the factor. Ecommerce sites load images on the front page its expected… do we penalize convention that works.
sure – i can relate to the speed issue…
but 1.5 sec’s my be a bit steep…..
all my sites are built on wordpress…
and after fiddling for a day (ok, i’n not a coder….:)….
i had to:
use a simple, very clean theme – which took me a while to rework into looking like something…
cut down adsense to 1 block.
remove all other material from the sidebar….
and have only one product link at the bottom of the post.
so yes – for the little guy, 1.5 sec’s is a bit tough to make….
many blogs that rely on advertising income will simply drop off the face of google, i suppose…
many of them good blogs….
in my opinion.
of course, video, etc is out of the question now….
back to the drawing board….
thanx
pj
Speed of loading makes sense, but I don’t think it has that much to do with ultra-fast servers and lines. It is people who don’t resize their images, or who haven’t taken load time into consideration. If you want video on your landing page, have the page load first, then queue the video.
One thing I noticed with ASP.net is that if your app isn’t active then it can take a long time to load the first time while it recompiles. So if you don’t have steady traffic 24 hrs a day, you should do something to make sure your site is kept active all hours. It would really suck if your site actually does respond fast once loaded, but if it is slow at 3AM when Googlebot crawls it. I wrote an Access DB and used system scheduler to open all my sights once every 20 minutes in off peak hours to make sure it is always ready to load quickly.
This will also force people to write better structured database calls so your page only has to hit db’s once, not 5 or 6 times before loading. It is at least nice that Google’s directions are in line with a better user experience which is what we should all be working towards anyway.
“If you want video on your landing page, have the page load first, then queue the video. ”
How is that relevant? I still have to wait for the video to load before I can do anything with it. It’s the same amount of time either way, so why should it matter at all?
I wonder how many of the comments here are from people that actually run a website..? very few I wouldn’t mind betting.
I think people ought to be made aware that whilst shared hosting costs a mere $10 / month, dedicated hosting costs around $450 / month, this being the case, it does not take a brain surgeon to figure out that if Google goes ahead with this, then the only people that will be providing websites for the populace will be the big businesses, the corporations, the supermarkets of the internet! Is this what you would call fair trade ? because I certainly do not
& I doubt very much if the monopolies commission would see it as fair trade either.
This is just one more kick in a long line of kicks that Google has dealt to the small business man & yes there are some crap sites out there, but for those that do not know about SEO or web development, bounce rate should come into play & cause such sites to receive a considerably lower ranking. By forcing people to spend thousands per year on hosting, this is only going to reduce the variety & diversity of the Internet & at the same time restrict what we can learn & who we can learn it from.
This is definitely a bread and butter issue for both web design companies and SEOs; this will provide better products for their clients by way of better user experiences. This might even sway both developed and developing countries to increase investment in IT infrastructure – a true reflection of the reality that an increased number of consumers are making purchases online.
I have some concerns.. firstly has google not taken note of what has happened over at ebay? when ebay started pratting it’s users about many simply up’ed and buggered off… have google forgotten that webmasters are, in many cases paying adwords customers and by default users of the internet as well.. very active users of the internet in most cases?
Mr Cutts and his buddies would do well to look to legends past… Google is a SERP’s giant but legends also speak of another giant who was brought down to earth with a big thump by a lad called David and a single stone.
It would be interesting to see when Mr Cutts and co are actually going to ask google users what they think needs to be considered important ranking factors instead of dictating like a group of deranged lunatic. I think answers like weeding out scam sites, adwords sites, abandoned sites and sites that promote race hate etc from googles index will be a little higher priority than a one second difference in load times.
Claiming everyone has broadband is no defence either, at peak times it can slow down to stupid speeds that are only marginaly better than dial up at best.
Quality is often a better business model than quantity. i would rather wait for an extra second and have a quality site open in front of me than a fast loading site that is utter s**t and bears little relevence to the query… errr actually its already like that now, maybe thats why i use bing a lot more these days.
Are they really not taking into consideration the relative speed that other pages visited by the same user happen to load? Can someone with a dial-up connection, a slow machine, and a Google Toolbar completely destroy your site by reading page after page veeeerrrrrryyyyyy sllooooooowwwwwllllllllyyy? Is this going to be yet another way that competitors can screw up your Google ranking?
I’m worried because I use WordPress which is slow by default, as result WordPress will no longer be the perfect machine for SEO. Another thing, if my visitors are from Latin America and they have poor internet speed my site will be considered extremely bad. Right now my site is worst than 85% of the sites. I don’t agree, is not that bad.
It seems to me that Google is trying to slip things past us all. I am starting to feel as if Google are just really wealthy cyber bullies. To slowly try to take over the internet is becoming a little over rated. The concept of making money is simple. Google seems to be more confusing than their long drawn out instructions. No one entity should ever have too much power. That fatal disease “Greed” has been known to kill people. I would hate to see the day that Google gets over thrown. They are not the only search engine, why are they the ones making all the rules. Who gave them this power, and why does the poor always have to suffer. How about helping the unfortunate. Are there nothing but atheist in the business industry. Is it only the mean, bad, and ugly get to the top. Google should do better about giving back to the community. They only function because we the consumer use their products and services. Now what will they become if 75% of there consumers left their services behind. I know it is a big number, but they should realize that they are slapping there source of income in the face. Wake up Google. Greed will make you fail big time. We are all watching you.
I think this is a big issue because businesses like mine who need to showcase there images and recieve a lot of work through their websites are going to be hit worse because more images slower site in turn lower rankings.
This is going to be unfare to our businesses.
This is really a dumb idea, and it’s just one more way that Google is going to F*** with content producers. “Oh, we’re sorry. Your site wasn’t fast enough for us, so we’re going to serve up a nice unauthorized duplicate of your content, complete with AdSense ads, instead.”
This is truely a money thing. What made google was its abiliy to find the little guy that had good info on what you where looking for. And now thats going to change? This will become the down fall of google……..
I think this is a good idea!
So does this mean that any web page that contains flash (.swf) or image files are going to be at a major disadvantage?
Bang the fastest loading page ever. It’s soo, so simple..
An empty webpage will do this… OK no content but adding content will slow load times down.
And… what about all those sites made as a hobby, not the fastest. Now they have to re-write them just to please Google.. Hu! they don’t have time or the money it’s a hobby for them not a business.
What about HTML5 all the stuff it does must slow load times?
I’m at the mercy of my hosting company? I would have to display my blog 1 blog per page to get preferred ranking? Nonsense.
As I read many of these comments, I’m amazed at the selfish motives behind some of the responses. Search engines are designed to serve internet searchers, not developers. It’s not Google’s responsibility to be concerned with catering to to financial aspirations that motivate many web designers. Page speed is absolutely relevant to information seekers and most users would agree that speed should be a strong factor in the ranking process.
Speed is simply another expense for any e-commerce stores. If every online stores have to compete for ranking by the speed of their sites, then by far, many good deals selling websites will have no “fighting ground” versus giant e-commerce coporations simply because the smaller ones are not as greedy as them thus not making enough to improve their website speed.