Google: Speed Might Become A Ranking Factor In 2010

14 years ago

I don't think Google is stupid enough to make speed a big factor in rankings...but there's nothing worse than clicking on a search result and having it take forever to load.

Their algorithm already takes into account dozens of factors, so adding one probably wont be noticeable to most webmasters/visitors.

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SurviveUnemployment

14 years ago

Site performance is already a factor and has been for years. I don't know how much weight it has, but it makes sense that if the site is quick, it is well programmed and professional, right? There are so many ways to speed up a site now that it's not even funny.

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Mike Anthony

14 years ago

If I read Matt Cutts right he's talking about really slow loading pages so I would agree with it. It destroys the experience when you click on a link and it takes two mintues to load. If you can't or haven't bothered to make your content accessible enough you don't deserve to rank high.

Remember though even if you have video or huge graphic files as long as the text loads fast enough you shouldn't have a problem.

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banks

14 years ago

Originally Posted by ramkarthik

But still, what do you prefer?

1. Search for a keyword and find an average information page that loads fast

2. A top quality page that comparatively loads slower

I will go for second every time.

It won't be a matter of Fast "OR" Quality, but more of when it comes down to the wire with 2 great information sources that can both serve the users query but one can do it 3 times faster.

I would do the same thing, and show the fastest first and slowest second.

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ramkarthik

14 years ago

I do agree that you don't want to see very slow loading pages. But when you rank a page based on speed as one of its factors, surely the site with even a small percentage of slowness will go down in score. This will affect its ranking.

What if I put out ordinary content and do all the SEO work that I can do and also increase the speed of my site? Say I push a site ranked number two, which has better content, to three (lets not consider first). Then I'm going to get around 4 or 5% more visitors just because my page loads faster.

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banks

14 years ago

Originally Posted by ramkarthik

What if I put out ordinary content and do all the SEO work that I can do and also increase the speed of my site? Say I push a site ranked number two, which has better content, to three (lets not consider first). Then I'm going to get around 4 or 5% more visitors just because my page loads faster.

Many ranking factors don't effect every query, or every vertical or are applied differently depending on keyword triggers.

For instance some queries trigger a geo mix of results, or a video media rich set of results. Who knows, this speed ranking factor may only be applied where the query requires urgency or can be served best by a faster site.

Sure one search query your site gets found by out of the thousands, might cause it to rank a spot higher because it's faster.. But another query you might rank a spot lower because it's best served by the other guy because he has a video.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other don't get hung up on it. Optimize your site for speed to spare your visitors waiting and reduce your bandwidth costs, if Google ranks you a spot higher for a keyword then great.

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JohnMcCabe 14 years ago

My guess is that if this comes to pass, it's aimed at improving the user experience. Large commercial sites like newspapers are often the worst offenders. You click to read a story, and you get the headline, followed by individual calls to 46 different ad servers, and you can't see the content until all 46 ads are loaded. It can seem like forever, and if one of those scripts hangs, the whole thing stalls out and the page locks up.

I'm guessing that most people, when their patience runs out, will hit the back button to go back to the search page. That bounce might be considered a vote against the page the user clicked to.

That's much different than a page with an audio or video that takes a little time to load, especially if you have a proper progress indicator so the user can tell the page hasn't hung up.
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Akky

14 years ago

Or maybe, we shall call it Google SpeedRank ?

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Eric Lorence 14 years ago

More nitpicking BS ...

Web Spam can "load" as fast as anything else, speed is no determination of "quality" ... this is about dictating the levels of advertising on sites, including Java script and ad banners ... :rolleyes:

You'd think Matt Cutts was the new Alan Greenspan or something.
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mojojuju

14 years ago

Originally Posted by ramkarthik

Now, how can speed determine the quality of content?

It can't. And I'm sure that Google doesn't presume it can. And while web site speed can't determine the quality of content, it does however have much to do with a quality user experience. I see it as no surprise that Google understands the importance of this.

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Eric Lorence

14 years ago

Originally Posted by mojojuju

It can't. And I'm sure that Google doesn't presume it can. And while web site speed can't determine the quality of content, it does however have much to do with a quality user experience. I see it as no surprise that Google understands the importance of this.

If someone is on "Dial Up" there is no "Quality User Experience" - if anything sites will become "slower" with new and sophisticated user features meant to enhance that experience.

1g users or 126k dial up ...

Who decides?

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ramkarthik

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Eric Lorence

If someone is on "Dial Up" there is no "Quality User Experience" - if anything sites will become "slower" with new and sophisticated user features meant to enhance that experience.

1g users or 126k dial up ...

Who decides?

Right. It is not something that can be a factor.

Danny Sullivan, SEO blogger, raised an interesting question on twitter saying:

Fast relates to quality, how?

That's exactly what I've been trying to say.

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askloz

14 years ago

The Big G don't work it out that way, they work it out by how fast they can crawl your page, if they experience probs, then it's gonna decrease user experience in their mind.

Originally Posted by Eric Lorence

If someone is on "Dial Up" there is no "Quality User Experience" - if anything sites will become "slower" with new and sophisticated user features meant to enhance that experience.

1g users or 126k dial up ...

Who decides?

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BIG Mike

Banned 14 years ago

Originally Posted by mojojuju

It can't. And I'm sure that Google doesn't presume it can. And while web site speed can't determine the quality of content, it does however have much to do with a quality user experience. I see it as no surprise that Google understands the importance of this.

And you can expect to see more and more variables focusing on quality user experience in the future.

In my opinion, it's a good thing - people can game a lot of ranking with SEO all day long, but a quality experience can't be gamed so easily.

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SeanSupplee

14 years ago

Because if your paying the money to get your site on a dedicated server it most likely is going to have quality content compared to some $4.99 shared hosting site. With that said its also quality because I don't want to be waiting around all day for some site to load to get my information I don't have time for that and it think thats why speed is going to become a factor. So in a way I support it if they go with this. The reason is I have seen a few sites ranked number one for keywords and 20 sec latter the site still has not loaded so I just leave.

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InternetMarketingIQ

14 years ago

And you as a webmaster can only do so much to control speed. You have zero control over your shared host. This is just a way to reward deep pockets who can afford faster connections and technology.

It's moronic to think that a site is somehow "better" because it loads faster. Wine is better because it came from this years crop?

This was straight out of Matt Cutts mouth of course, and Google may choose to do it or it could just be a big PR thing to get them to try and convince Webmasters to create better code which lowers the burden on their crawls and benefits them.

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mojojuju 14 years ago

Originally Posted by InternetMarketingIQ

And you as a webmaster can only do so much to control speed.

Most people are not doing enough to enhance speed.

Take for instance much of the common blogging and CMS platforms. Many people use them to create dynamic pages, but much of the content rarely changes. So they could be caching those pages and serving them as static documents along with using cache control headers. But instead, many people have sites that don't change in a week's time, yet the page has to be rendered by the server for every page request. That takes time and it doesn't matter how fast any given CMS can render pages. Having the pages cached if possible get's them out the door faster when a browser requests them.

Originally Posted by InternetMarketingIQ

It's moronic to think that a site is somehow "better" because it loads faster. Wine is better because it came from this years crop?

You're right, it doesn't make the content better. Nobody from Google has suggested that it does. But good content that loads fast makes for a better web browsing experience than good content that loads slow. Who wants to wait 15 seconds for a page to load when it's not 1995?
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askloz

14 years ago

speed is already a factor

been a factor for ages.

Originally Posted by ramkarthik

This is not good for Google if it's going to happen.

You might want to read this article:
Google: Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010 | WebProNews

It seems speed of a site may become one of the ranking factors in 2010.

Now, how can speed determine the quality of content? I know it is only going to be one of the many factors if it gets implemented. But still, what do you prefer?

1. Search for a keyword and find an average information page that loads fast

2. A top quality page that comparatively loads slower

I will go for second every time.

Do you think Google is going get better if they implement this?

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clickbump

14 years ago

Originally Posted by ramkarthik

This is not good for Google if it's going to happen.

It seems speed of a site may become one of the ranking factors in 2010.

I'm good with that. Count me in. I hate slow loading sites so much I've spent the better part of my adult life building fast ones.

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michael_nguyen

14 years ago

I don't know why all the fuss here. I get the vibe everyone is either one end or the other. Just be both. Have great content (Which you should have in the first place, who wants crap?) Have a good host. Kinda stupid to have a crap host in the first place. All of this can be controlled and it's the LEAST you should have.

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kkchoon

14 years ago

Originally Posted by ramkarthik

I do agree that you don't want to see very slow loading pages. But when you rank a page based on speed as one of its factors, surely the site with even a small percentage of slowness will go down in score. This will affect its ranking.

What if I put out ordinary content and do all the SEO work that I can do and also increase the speed of my site? Say I push a site ranked number two, which has better content, to three (lets not consider first). Then I'm going to get around 4 or 5% more visitors just because my page loads faster.

I think speed will only be part of the ranking factors, and it has been there for a long time. Instead of ranking high for speedy site, I think Google will penalize slow site when they reach certain slowness...

If speed really meant a lot, I think top 10 sites will all be text, no video no picture! That is rather - "STUPID"!

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WareTime 14 years ago

As Loz says, it's already a factor. Though it may become more of one in the future.

If your site is so slow as to get ranked lower because of it's speed, don't you think users hitting your links in the serps are bailing before it loads anyway? And if they don't, you had better have outstanding content to make them persist or dare click on another page of yours that wastes their time loading. Bounce rate and pages per visit have a positive correlation to speed.

Time to prune some of those plugins
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bannor32

14 years ago

It seems a bit of a contradiction to me. I've read in the past that Google will favor sites with relevant rich media content (images, video etc), yet a site that is text only would have a definite speed advantage when it comes to page loading. I think speed will have very little weight when it comes to ranking.

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TomBond

14 years ago

I haven't read all this thread so I apologise if someone has already said this.

Google wants to deliver a great user experience to it's users so they keep coming back. If Google serves pages to users that takes minutes to load, the user may become frustrated and start using another search engine. It therefore makes perfect sense for page load time to play a small part in their algorithm.

I've thought this was on the cards ever since Google released it's addon for Firebug. Check it out, it's a great way of finding out how your load times can be improved.

Page Speed Home

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jazbo

14 years ago

Utter nonsense the lot of it. Sorry but it is. Loading speed from where to where? What if I have a UK site but choose to host elsewhere due to market forces? Am I to be penalized in the SERP's because of that decision?

What about if my site is in the UK but is aimed at ex-pats in the far east? How would speed be defined then?

What would the thresholds be? How would we be informed? Sounds like lawsuit city to me - you penalized X companies site for loading slower than x kb's per second?

And I would love to see where it is written that it is already in the algo and is a ranking factor?

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Tdale 14 years ago

Speed is already a factor in Adwords.
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TristanPerry

14 years ago

He probably just means that really slow loading sites (say 1 second and above for the data transfer alone) would get penalized a bit.

I doubt they'd have a sliding scale, or base this on a web-page's size.

So yeah, I think that this just means that a site that takes longer than (say) 1 second to load may get penalized.

Which would, IMO, be a good thing. I've seen some websites/forums take seconds to load, and clearly this isn't desirable.

Get a good host and there's not an issue

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Google: Speed Might Become A Ranking Factor In 2010

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