I Got Google Slapped For Site Speed!

[mjwoodi]

Hi,

I have been seriously slapped backwards out of the rankings, and spent some time looking into why.

I noticed a correlation between my site speed and my ranks dropping which has cost me around 2,500 unique visitors a day which converts into an awful lot of money down the drain!

I just 'assumed' that because I have a really powerful dedicated quad core server with 8GB of ram that these changes wouldn't affect me. Well I was wrong Dont make the same assumption I did!

I wrote a blog post about it here with full details IThinkItsMe How Site Speed Cost Me Thousands

If anything, I hope you learn the lesson I learnt the hard way! I imagine this is going to affect a large number of internet marketers over the coming months (if not weeks).

I think this might mark the end of shared hosting as we know it!

Has anyone else experienced the site speed slap yet? It hurts

[Peter Gregory]

It is not necessarily your hosting that is causing these problems, there are often things you can do from within your site that help with these issues. One such example I found with a site I was managing is that they were calling multiple css files when they could get away with just one and remove unnecessary css. We also found some issues with image sizes and few other things we thought were minor, but in the end it helped improve our speed quite a bit and nothing was needed at the server level.

A good resource to check out is: Page Speed Home

[WareTime]

Correlation does not equal causation. You see one graph and the events on that graph coincide with your traffic, so bam, that's gotta be it.

It could be a third unknown thing.

Admittedly I click away from sites as slow as yours was. If this was the cause, there are a whole lot of wordpress sites destined for the dump.

The thing is, you just don't have enough evidence to draw a conclusion. Why? You violated the sample size of a population. Notice how scientists and others doing actual tests pick many subjects, not ONE. You picked ONE subject. A sample of one can not be used to draw conclusions for many.

My site has seen ups and downs too. I'm sure it's because I'm on shared hosting and some idiot next to me gets some crappy plugin or the like for his blog and when the isp finally figures out who's the culprit, they make the person with the poor performing code fix it or remove it, then my page load speed increases. I've never lost ranking or visits during the times my site loaded slow.

Good stab at some link bait though. The timing was good. You'll probably get some back links.

[vikramd]

That's right - there are 200 variables for your SERP ranking. Site speed is one of them now:

Google incorporating site speed in search rankings

IMO - the safest way to address this is to buy a Virtual Private Server - this way I know I'm guaranteed a minimum of server resources so shared hosting can't bring me down.

There are still other factors at play though (CSS, Word Press Plugins, DB performance, Network etc.).

[mjwoodi]

Originally Posted by Peter Gregory

It is not necessarily your hosting that is causing these problems, there are often things you can do from within your site that help with these issues. One such example I found with a site I was managing is that they were calling multiple css files when they could get away with just one and remove unnecessary css. We also found some issues with image sizes and few other things we thought were minor, but in the end it helped improve our speed quite a bit and nothing was needed at the server level.

A good resource to check out is: Page Speed Home

Hi Peter, in my blog post I go over these details and that is one of the fixes I actually did, I also did some tweaking at server level and reduced my page load time to 2-3 seconds.

Originally Posted by WareTime

Correlation does not equal causation. You see one graph and the events on that graph coincide with your traffic, so bam, that's gotta be it.

It could be a third unknown thing.

Admittedly I click away from sites as slow as yours was. If this was the cause, there are a whole lot of wordpress sites destined for the dump.

The thing is, you just don't have enough evidence to draw a conclusion. Why? You violated the sample size of a population. Notice how scientists and others doing actual tests pick many subjects, not ONE. You picked ONE subject. A sample of one can not be used to draw conclusions for many.

My site has seen ups and downs too. I'm sure it's because I'm on shared hosting and some idiot next to me gets some crappy plugin or the like for his blog and when the isp finally figures out who's the culprit, they make the person with the poor performing code fix it or remove it, then my page load speed increases. I've never lost ranking or visits during the times my site loaded slow.

I have been in the SEO game for over 10 years, I didn't just see those two graphs and draw a conclusion. In fact, this is one of the last things I looked at.

And it's not strictly wordpress that was the issue for my site speed, it was a combination of things. However I did notice the intensedebate plugin and also any plugin that makes calls into Facebook cripples load times!

Each persons problems are going to differ site to site in terms of load time.

As im not a scientest conducting strict lab experiments im not to concerned about having many subjects.

I'm simply speaking of my personal experience which in fact is the opposite of 'violating the sample size of a population' as it will encourage more people to share their experiences so people like ourselves can see a bigger picture.

And although I am only 1 person, Google did officially announce site load time will play a factor in rankings which is the only conclusion you need.

[WareTime]

Originally Posted by mjwoodi

And although I am only 1 person, Google did officially announce site load time will play a factor in rankings which is the only conclusion you need.

Oh please, stop. My sides hurt.

[Groovystar]

My site is several times faster now since we moved to our new host and server, than it was before, and we are way lower in Google now. {And yes my members agree it's loads faster so it's not just me}

Therefore, to me this theory holds no water.

[Kurt]

Originally Posted by WareTime

Oh please, stop. My sides hurt.

I've contended for years that load speed was a factor. Once you stop laughing, maybe you can explain why page speed would NOT be a ranking factor?

At the very least, common sense dictates that a SE spider has some type of timeout. The faster the pages load, the more pages can be spidered within any given time frame. If someone has a site with a lot of pages, it probably becomes more important to be fast, simply from an indexing standpoint, if not for ranking.

From Google:

The disclosure about page speed being a ranking factor will certainly have an impact on user experience. What’s the impact for Google?
Speed is now a factor in rankings because we’re trying to best serve users, and studies show that users are happier with faster sites and less satisfied with slow sites. More satisfied users are shown to spend more time on the internet. More time on the internet means more time spent learning new things, becoming a better informed citizen, surfing the web and, of course, checking out your website. Speed can be a win for all parties involved.

Interview with Maile Ohye of Google - Online Marketing Blog

We can dismiss this info if we choose, however I keep coming back to a bit of logic:

Fast pages may or may not help rankings, but no way will being faster ever hurt.

Slow pages may or may not hurt rankings, but there's no way being slow will ever help.

[Mike Anthony]

You know what? I wouldn't be so quick to claim that it isn't your server speed. 9 seconds as an average load time is quite slow. Since thats an average you in fact might have been experiencing even slower speeds at times and I could see a server problem causing crawl problems which WOULD make your site tumble.

I don't think its funny. It may in fact be a key problem. That factor isn't even theoretical. Its well known. However it won't be the end of hosting since that is slow even by shared hosting standards. I run all my sites on Litespeed. Its pretty cheap to find hosting utilizing it. I'd have to take a look at when last Google bot crawled your site.

[Kurt]

PS...Let me add I do agree that the data is insufficient to claim that load speed was the reason for the drop in rankings for the OP.

It's possible that if a site is slow, it may also have been down for periods of time. Has server uptime been recorded?

It could be any number of other factors, or more likely a combination of factors.

[paulgl]

I guess if we reason the sandbox away, then it must be
site speed.

Google has made itself clear. Does not affect 99% of searches
in the US. And as of now, I think the US is the only place it
matters.

Your site's relevancy is the most important thing. There is NO
way google will slap your site down for site speed if it
rocks in your niche.

I knew these claims were only a matter of time.

Here is Matt Cutts doing his best to ward off this nonsense:

In fact, if you read the official blog post, you’ll notice that the current implementation mentions that fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking. That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page. So please don’t worry that the effect of this change will be huge. In fact, I believe the official blog post mentioned that “We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing.” The fact that not too many people noticed the change is another reason not to stress out disproportionately over this change.

I'd like to point out another quote on this.

... this change highlights that there are very constructive things that can directly improve your website’s user experience. Instead of wasting time on keyword meta tags, you can focus on some very easy, straightforward, small steps that can really improve how users perceive your site.

If there is ANYTHING I preach over and over, it is that last sentence.
So many people concentrate on parlor tricks instead of real, on site SEO.

Paul

[pluto1]

I had no idea that the website speed would be affecting the SERPs. My site has gone down dramatically. I had no idea until I read this thread.

After running tests on the website speed of my site on this website speed checker I have been told to optimize it more.

Not sure how to do that, any ideas?

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by pluto1

I had no idea that the website speed would be affecting the SERPs. My site has gone down dramatically. I had no idea until I read this thread.

Are you not reading the whole thread???? *sigh*

The sky is falling. Keep it going!

Paul

[Kurt]

Originally Posted by paulgl

If there is ANYTHING I preach over and over, it is that last sentence.
So many people concentrate on parlor tricks instead of real, on site SEO.

Paul

Quote from Cutts:

... this change highlights that there are very constructive things that can directly improve your website’s user experience. Instead of wasting time on keyword meta tags, you can focus on some very easy, straightforward, small steps that can really improve how users perceive your site.

Site speed is a big factor on how people perceive a site. I even quoted another Google official saying the same thing.

To repeat, Interview with Maile Ohye of Google - Online Marketing Blog

Speed is now a factor in rankings because we’re trying to best serve users, and studies show that users are happier with faster sites and less satisfied with slow sites.

If you're truly interested in how users perceive your site, then I suggest you consider page load speed.

Again, fast pages won't hurt you SERs and it may help, plus real people like fast loading pages.

[paulgl]

Come on. This sky is falling crap is just that.
A lousy site is a lousy site.
A terrific site is a terrific site.
Period.

If you really think you got beat down for site speed,
you have a lousy site. Period. Nobody wants to fully
read anything. They hear "site speed" oh no! I'm going
down hill!

Well, have a nice trip to the sandbox.

But please, please read:

The main thing I want to get across is: don’t panic. We mentioned site speed as early as last year, and you can watch this video from February where I pointed out that we still put much more weight on factors like relevance, topicality, reputation, value-add, etc. — all the factors that you probably think about all the time. Compared to those signals, site speed will carry much less weight.

Unfortunately, people concentrate on things that carry MUCH less weight.

If you are slapped for site speed, you have forgotten and neglected the real SEO.
And I am all for weeding out sites that do SEO on feelings. Good riddance!

Paul

[bgmacaw]

And people aren't wearing enough hats...

YouTube - "Meaning of Life" - "People are not...

[Intrepreneur]

Googl Page Speed tool tells all. They tell you what they want to see. A quick analysis says your page load speed isn't so bad but some of your coding is i.e. your CSS is showing up as awful in Google's opinion. Try analysing it with Page Speed and work it from there.

Though I still don't think Page Load Speed killed you because check the likes of Mashable and they still rank

[digidoodles]

Originally Posted by paulgl

Come on. This sky is falling crap is just that.
A lousy site is a lousy site.
A terrific site is a terrific site.
Period.

The thing is, for me and most users out there, a lousy site IS a site that loads slow.

You can have great content and if it loads slow, I'm not waiting. I'm going elsewhere. Time is money.

Warmly,

Brandi

[mjwoodi]

Hi,

Some very valid points and opinions here, very interesting reading thanks for the input.

In terms of bigger sites that are slow loading such as mashable/facebook these sites are clearly authority sites so may not suffer from the site speed issue quite as much as smaller sites.

Also my site wasn't sandboxed or anything like that, it has helds its rankings solidly for around 3 years now without issue and is well established in the niche.

If Google are making official announcements that site speed plays a part in rankings, I tend to believe them! I have now spoken to a few people who's site has dropped from the rankings in the past couple of weeks, and all of them have one thing in common which is slow load time.

The main problem seem's to be if your site is making calls into services like facebook/twitter. My site was perfectly viewable and useable within 4 seconds initially, but spent another 5 seconds making calls into facebook/twitter.

[mjwoodi]

After just checking my rankings, I've reappeard at position number 11 for the term I was previously #1 for, will keep an eye on this over the next 48 hours

[chart3]

Did you ever resolve the problem and return your site to its original ranking?

[jazbo]

Sounds like this was all a google dance.

Site load speeds are irrelevant for most of us unless your site is like a tortoise carrying bags of heavy shopping up a hill.

If you arfe part of the less tahn 1% of sites it might apply to then worry, else take off the tin foil hats.

[sbsb]

I believe I may have been g'slapped for site speed at or around the same day.

Did it happen to you between april 18 and april 25? Looks like it did. If so then we both may have had roughly the same issue

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by jazbo

Sounds like this was all a google dance.

Site load speeds are irrelevant for most of us unless your site is like a tortoise carrying bags of heavy shopping up a hill.

If you are part of the less than 1% of sites it might apply to then worry, else take off the tin foil hats.

LOL!

I like your style, Jazbo.

Keep it coming. So many people have taken this site speed to yet another
thing to worry about rather than real honest to goodness SEO. No matter
how many times google says that it is such a tiny part when compared to
other optimization, you still have those magic list makers. And this has
moved up on that magic list unfortunately.

I see a lot of those tin foil hats lately.

Paul

[WareTime]

Originally Posted by Kurt

I've contended for years that load speed was a factor. Once you stop laughing, maybe you can explain why page speed would NOT be a ranking factor?

I didn't say it wasn't a ranking factor.

I said it was preposterous for the OP to conclude site speed as his problem.