Whatever Google make, the only thing what is important for an IM is a target List with prospects. With Adswap and Safelists and other ways, you can easy look about the run of this crawlers.

I mad my fortune off-line, without Google and I must say, sometimes I didn’t understand the reactions of this changes. Sure Google is the number one and I search also there for info, but Google is also an advertisment firm, thats means also Google is an IM as we.
With this change, Google’s crawler crawl only the IM sites which have enough power, money, for her sites.
That means for me as searcher, I find with Google only a certain sort of sites, naturally with other prices, Adwords will be paid.
I don’t think that Google stay with this speed limit, perhaps the half of the world wide web is till yet with slow connections. We live in the time of information overload but when the half of information isn’t if you search for something, you change and so the Adwords clients lose their site seeings.

In my opinion, rather too much importance is given to Google’s pronouncements about what it considers good for the Internet, and its business. The sooner that Google’s influence, size and power is curbed, either through legislation or technological developments….. the better for everyone.

My preferred internet browser is Opera, fast and with features that ease my working life. I can’t, however, use Opera when I access my Adwords account. Opera is a direct competitor to Google in other areas of Google’s aspirations,ie browsers.

I don’t like monopolies, or near monoplolies. Ultimatelty, they are just self-serving, which overall is bad for everyon else.

Hello,

As always you bring us good articles to debate on, keep up the good work!.

In the past I wrote that I cannot afford to keep up with google’s changes so I decided to lay down my efforts but in this issue I think even though nobody put google as the internet watcher, they are right, on the other hand, they should not dictate us how WE want OUR website to look like.

As an internet user I can say that I leave pages that take more than 10sec. to load, so I do not need google for that.

Instead of going and ranking pages by their on load speed and punishing the owner for not having money to buy a faster website provider, they should rank it by page weight, we all know that a 15k page will load faster than a 145k page so this can be the solution to take off the equation problems that can come from bad servers connection.

Having a low weight page is an SEO advice known for decades, today the internet speed is faster than it was years before and we can afford to load pages weighting more but there are places that the speed connection is still low.

As always the website developer should focus on their visitors more than google’s demands.

>>>they are squeezing the poor people of the World out from search results and glorifying huge corporations

Not only is my answer YES, Google should be using speed as a metric for ranking factor of websites, but why didn’t they do this sooner?

Is it not hypocritical that it seems part of our human nature/behavior to seek and consume data, information, etc. as fast as possible, yet would debate the metric of speed as a ranking factor to consume said information?

Is this not why every new communication media that has offered more speed has gained millions of adopters faster than its predecessor?
Books->Newspapers->T.V.->Internet
Town Halls->Telephone Calls->Cellular Calls
Dial-Up Modems (increasing with speed, remember how fast 14.4 was?)->Cable/DSL Modems
and so on and so on…

And mind you, it is a factor. “a factor”, not “the factor”. Sure it is going to change rankings, good for the consumer, bad for those who have sat at the top of search engine results but haven’t optimized to deliver their content with more immediacy–in a medium that demands immediacy?

Back to my first paragraph, why do I question why this wasn’t implemented sooner? Remember dial-up? Even pushing into our current century, many didn’t have high-speed internet available yet. Remember what happened if you want to a more content/media rich website back then? So why wasn’t page speed one of the biggest considerations back then?

Yes, James, that last argument makes sense, but we have high speed access to the internet now! Yes, I know. But how many of you have iPhones, BB’s, and other internet capable phones working of EDGE (yikes) or 3G? Some websites offer mobile versions, others don’t. Studies have shown the frequency in which we will reach for our mobile handsets to access the information we desire on the internet, and we are human, we like access to information… and fast! In almost all cases I personally prefer the full version of a website, not the mobile version — do I need to make the case for speed here?

So, instead of asking the question “Do you think it’s a good idea for Google to use speed as a ranking factor?” we should ask “Why are you surprised?” Great SEO’s, designers, and others always had the speed factor in mind when designing great internet media.

It’s about the user experience and speed is a considerable factor in that experience.

I can go on for ages, but there we go

I think that People dont have to worry about the Page Speed to much. Shure Loading Time is one Factor for a nice Webranking but i think it is much more important to have good Content and stoff that folks like to read.

I predicted there was A reason behind this shake up, well Google is launchin a speed up app http://speedupwebsite.com/new-google-app-spdy-will-speed-up-your-websites.php , seems there gona force you to get it if you want to rank well

Personal experience shows good content under 10kb with 20 backlinks gets better rankings than a corporate competitor of larger page size and thousands of backlinks. Other methods of reducing load time also caused a difference for our sites, but I’ve been studying this a few years now, knew this (or something very related) was a factor a long time ago.

Been using and implimenting suggestions from the Firefox addon Page Speed Google is promoting. Once I figured out some of the features and recommended modifications reccomended, I understand more and appreciate a tool that helps me improve sites performance for the visitors. If Google adds a little weight to sites that TRY to perform better for users then it’s a bonus.

One cool feature in minifying your stylesheet, jsut watch for those “special” attributes that aren’t supposed to work but you know do. It will replace them with compliant code instead. Overall, it’s a new addition to my SEO analysis routine.

Keep it Str8!

I hope speed is not going to be the most important factor, even if Google includes it.
After all, those news websites have an advantage over us, small bloggers. Those blogs with mainly graphical content, such as digital image, charts etc are being penalized.

Yes, it is a good thing to rank by speed. I have always gotten frustrated when I get to a slow page. It is inconsiderate from the web designers to create slow pages. It shows not enough regard or respect for the visitor. Pages that are too slow should be split into several smaller pages or simplified.

Hi, Chris.

I feel that Page Speed should be a major factor in Page Rank. I have worked very hard to keep the page size on my site (www.tellout.com) to around 10 KB, and most pages (I have 463)download completely, including pictures in 1 second or less.

I get fed up of sites that keep you waiting for what seems like an eternity to see their material. I have one friend who boasted his web site which was a course manual on photography for his students had only 1 page but 180 equivalent pages long! I never did manage the patience to wait for it to open completely.

Webmasters should, in my opinion, also split pages when they grow as I have done from 1 to 1A, 1B and 1C if necesary, just so that they will load easier and quicker. My server gives me each page length and a program like http://www.submitexpress.com (which is an excellent free resource) tells me how long each page takes to load.

Hope this helps,

Ron Meacock

In practical and usability sense, the faster the site loads the better, so that you don’t lose the visitors. Just a marketing perspective!

Should one have to reduce the quality of the site to gain a good ranking, by reducing the image quality and thus the visual impact of a site may have an negative impact on visitor satisfaction. I suppose there is a trade off between the visual and the speed, but who makes that decision. This question will have to be asked at the development stage between the client and the developer. We will wait and see.

The main factor that many cannot see is the ease with which site speed can be increased, without a significant financial penalty. Simply modding a site to reduce file size is the first step. Reduce images and use gzip where possible- check your site with firebug (it’s a very good, intuitive tool). Remember that the internet is a very big place and caching of sites will increase site speed without any increase in spend on website development/ hosting! I’m just about finished on a 2 week stint with our main website, reducing the size of files and optimising html for faster page load. Think the site’s running 50-60% faster now! Will now be working on images, before considering caching and optimising flash further…

Richard

Slow webpages are bad for the web owner regardless of page rank. Internet users, myself included do not wait more than 10 seconds for a page to load before moving onto the next.