Can Google really give a penalty for slow websites?

[Spartacus]

SO I was reading the webmaster guidlines and under technical guidelines it says:

Monitor your site's performance and optimize load times. Google's goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow Internet connections), and we hope that as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve.

So could Google give penalties to websites that are slow? My webhost has been really slow for months so...

[Miroslav Chodak]

No, Google will not penalize you. But, if your site is way too slow, it might negatively affect your rankings.

[Spartacus]

Originally Posted by kiranraj19

Google gives penalty for unethical sites with duplicate content & banned backlinks

Yeah I know.

[trytolearnmore]

Matt Cutts covered this somewhere on YouTube. He said it will become a problem only if Google Bot won't be able to get on your website.

[George Langer]

Google measures your site's feedback and if your site is too slow (in long term) I would believe your SERP will decrease.

[ronywilliam]

I dont think that google would penalize you if your website is slow.
But if it really is slow than you need to work on it, as it will affect the
user satisfaction level on your website.
Wont you get irritated if you reach on some website and want to check
it but its not ready to load....
SO, you get my point.
Google wont penalise you for a slow website, it only does that if you have
unethical or duplicate content...

[yukon]

OP, it's not a Google penalty.

If anything (bot), or anyone has to sit there & wait forever for a page to load, they will leave, instead of waiting all day.

Again, it's not a penalty, it's the webmasters own fault that the page loads slow.

[groceryalerts]

I try to use Content delivery network for this.

[Spartacus]

Originally Posted by yukon

OP, it's not a Google penalty.

If anything (bot), or anyone has to sit there & wait forever for a page to load, they will leave, instead of waiting all day.

Again, it's not a penalty, it's the webmasters own fault that the page loads slow.

Also, it might not be my webhost which I said it was in my opening post, but the plugin wpzonbuilder, since the site is faster with that turned off. I tested all this a while ago (I changed themes, turned of all plugins) but then it didn't seem to make any difference. Now it does for some reason. Going to turn wpzonbuilder off for a while and see what it does for the speed...long term.

But coming back to the penalty, it might be a penalty for something else then. Which I'm trying to find out.

If it's not a penalty then I don't really know what it is. I had good rankings for a while, untill my site dropped to the last page on google. I go easy on the backlinks, have unique and well written articles, paid attention to keyword density, on-page seo etc.

[JustaWizard]

Matt Cutts of Google's webspam team publicly announced that they are including site speed as ONE OF the 200+ ranking factors in their "secret sauce" algorithm and make it clear that a "slower" site will not be penalized; some accuse Cutts of spreading misinformation, but there's no reason to do so in this case. Yes, make your site load fast as possible/practicable, no do now worry about a site speed penalty.

Hope that helps!
Best,
David

[jhnbrwn]

Well, yes, it is true, harsh but true. Google is amazingly fast and really want to have companies of real fast ones. If it finds slow ones, it just don't bother to visit it again, resulting in no indexing or crawling. quite bad news, but again, harsh fact.

[yukon]

If you know it's your web host that is slow, I think I would move on to another host.

I'm with hostgator, & think it's a good deal considering how cheap the hosting is. HG support is awesome.

Who is your host?

Originally Posted by Spartacus

Also, it might not be my webhost which I said it was in my opening post, but the plugin wpzonbuilder, since the site is faster with that turned off. I tested all this a while ago (I changed themes, turned of all plugins) but then it didn't seem to make any difference. Now it does for some reason. Going to turn wpzonbuilder off for a while and see what it does for the speed...long term.

But coming back to the penalty, it might be a penalty for something else then. Which I'm trying to find out.

If it's not a penalty then I don't really know what it is. I had good rankings for a while, untill my site dropped to the last page on google. I go easy on the backlinks, have unique and well written articles, paid attention to keyword density, on-page seo etc.

[simonbuzz]

There is nothing to worry about slow sites...think about Askmen.com that site is way too slow but still it's ranking very well..

[InitialEffort]

Yes, it can affect your ranking. I've been using this tool: Pingdom Tools

It's funny how I had two themes made by the same people and using one theme drastically increased my SERPs. The other one was nearly identical but called all of these weird images that never even needed to be loaded on the page.

[Moneyerr]

Google does not penalize site for being slow but they will stay far behind than those which are fast and are updated regularly. If a website is slow or not easily accessible on internet or loads slowly how it can get indexed regularly, so is the cause that it is left behind.

[ebizman]

Site speed is definitely a factor in rankings.

[GlobalTrader]

If site loading speed is not a factor as many have posted here, then why does google webmaster tools under the sitemap include a chart showing how fast or slow your site loads overall in comparison to all other websites?

[ZaneZenMaster]

Well to be safe you; if you have wordpress, you can download a free plugin called wp-supercache or something like that.
This will speed up the load time of your site.

[strategic seo services]

Originally Posted by ZaneZenMaster

Well to be safe you; if you have wordpress, you can download a free plugin called wp-supercache or something like that.
This will speed up the load time of your site.

The plugin: WPMinify is another excellent one for Wordpress. Page load time does have an influence rankings. If your page takes too long to load, your bounce rate will be higher, causing Google to "think" that your page is not relevant for the searched term.

[friedman]

Tracking 125 keywords for my domain, three days after google webmaster tools told me that my page load time went from 1.5 sec to 10 sec I took an average 70 point decline. Studying the search volume for each keyword in adwords, I found that for nearly every high volume keyword I had been pushed down to page 30 or 40. Low volume keywords were hardly affected. I have installed WP super cache and used the pre-load feature so that hopefully, the next time google checks my speed my ranks come back. Google seems only to check this metric every six weeks or so...
So yes, there is no question, you will take a hard penalty for slow sites...

[dburk]

Hi Warriors,

As of April 9th 2010 Google has been using site speed as a ranking factor.

Here is the official announcement:

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.

Source: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Using site speed in web search ranking

[Shirlyn]

Slow loading sites can not get online benefits for the business nothing else because a online visitor can not wait for site to get loaded because their are plenty of options available.

[powerboss]

My sites were off google index as they were too slow and i had to change the host.

Now they are back in google index.

[jasonthewebmaster]

Google doesn't give "penalties" for anything... they are not in the penalty business. They may not show you any "love" but they certainly do not "penalize" any websites for any reason.


A lot of people talk about penalties.. when they really mean that google either will not give them higher rankings... or maybe will move them lower in the rankings...

I guess some could call that a penalty... but really it's not... its just that other sites are getting more "google love" than yours.. that is all.

[gittar1122]

If your site load time is high then it may be possible that Google Bot not able to properly crawl your site and this thing can negatively impact your site.


There is no such penalty as you will find a lot of slow sites staying in top 10. I think Google consider some other factors like site authority before giving it any negative point.

[dburk]

Originally Posted by gittar1122

If your site load time is high then it may be possible that Google Bot not able to properly crawl your site and this thing can negatively impact your site.


There is no such penalty as you will find a lot of slow sites staying in top 10. I think Google consider some other factors like site authority before giving it any negative point.

Hi gittar1122,

Did you not read my reply above? Do you know something about Google's algorithm that Google doesn't?

While, it is not a "penalty", it is a SERP ranking "signal", at least according to Google.

[nicktyler]

I heard somewhere that site stability along with speed might be a signal. So even if your site is really fast, if it is not really fast all the time and the load times fluctuate then it might negatively affect your rankings. Anybody know if there is any truth in that?

[dburk]

Originally Posted by nicktyler

I heard somewhere that site stability along with speed might be a signal. So even if your site is really fast, if it is not really fast all the time and the load times fluctuate then it might negatively affect your rankings. Anybody know if there is any truth in that?

Hi nicktyler,

Sigh...

If you read this thread you would see that information was already posted. If you are human READ THE THREAD before posting. If you are yet another spambot, then please go away!

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by jasonthewebmaster

Google doesn't give "penalties" for anything... they are not in the penalty business. They may not show you any "love" but they certainly do not "penalize" any websites for any reason.

A true google penalty would be a de-index, not a drop in SERPs.

Paul

[MBDirect]

Certainly you'll lose ranking, but also traffic, of course.

[App Developers]

Can't penalize but will effect your rankings in a negative way. You definitely want to speed it up as much as possible.