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What effect does site loading speed have on SEO

by Juan Pierre
13 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Does google consider site loading speed in its ranking factors? Ive have recently added a lot of ads to my blog and it is slowing down my site big time (let me hear it: ads is a silly way to monetize your blog) Im currently recieving very low organic traffic volumes as most of my traffic is coming from social media. My blog is fairly new and i dont expect much organic traffic in these early days, but could the slow loading speed be effecting my rankings?
#effect #loading #seo #site #speed
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    What effect does site loading speed have on SEO
    It only matters If you have pages that take an hour to load on a browser. Otherwise it's not important.
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  • Profile picture of the author Juan Pierre
    Before ads : 1.4sec after ads 22sec that is tested with pingdom.
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  • Profile picture of the author Juan Pierre
    located the ad that was taking so long to load, removed it, now site is loading at 3.9 sec which is more acceptable. Hopefully this is not long enough to send the bounce rate souring
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    • Profile picture of the author Sam JTB
      Originally Posted by Juan Pierre View Post

      located the ad that was taking so long to load, removed it, now site is loading at 3.9 sec which is more acceptable. Hopefully this is not long enough to send the bounce rate souring
      Good to hear you removed it early, I wouldn't worry about it now. I've never heard of an ad taking that long to load.
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  • Profile picture of the author Rob Irwin
    Yes, I believe it is a factor in ranking your website. Google is not going to rank a website that takes a long time to load. That causes a bad experience for their customers. You can also test your website on Google's own Pagespeed Insights https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
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  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    Google says that it is one of 200 ranking factors. If it is, it cannot be a very high priority one. Find me a news site that doesn't take forever to load and yet, those same sites rank extremely high for everything.

    It is supposed to be a much stronger ranking signal on mobile devices. Not sure if that is true, either, but I can only tell you what Google claims is the case.
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  • Profile picture of the author gpacx
    Site speed affects bounce rate, so you're getting hit twice if your site speed is really bad, in the sense that both site speed and bounce rate are signals that google is tracking for search engine rankings.

    There are an incredible amount of news sites that somehow continue to maintain high google rankings even though their websites are poorly optimized and seem to take ages to load on computers.

    Once you get above ~7 seconds page load time, you'll probably find that your bounce rate goes up a lot and google isn't going to like you very much.
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    • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
      Originally Posted by gpacx View Post

      Site speed affects bounce rate, so you're getting hit twice if your site speed is really bad, in the sense that both site speed and bounce rate are signals that google is tracking for search engine rankings.
      Google has stated on numerous occasions that it DOES NOT use bounce rate in its algorithm. It is one of the many myths you see SEOs stating about the Google algorithm. There are many reasons they cannot use bounce rate to determine a site's worthiness of ranking, including, only a very small fraction of websites have Google Analytics installed so they cannot use the metric to rank sites and there is no way for Google to determine if you got the information you needed or part of the information you needed and left. It is, in Google's words, "a very noisy, unreliable signal."
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      • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
        Originally Posted by dave_hermansen View Post

        Google has stated on numerous occasions that it DOES NOT use bounce rate in its algorithm. It is one of the many myths you see SEOs stating about the Google algorithm. There are many reasons they cannot use bounce rate to determine a site's worthiness of ranking, including, only a very small fraction of websites have Google Analytics installed so they cannot use the metric to rank sites and there is no way for Google to determine if you got the information you needed or part of the information you needed and left. It is, in Google's words, "a very noisy, unreliable signal."

        Besides the fact that Google cannot get the data for every site and every visit, there is also the major point that most IM'ers seem to miss. A bounce is not always indicative of a bad experience.

        For example, Wikipedia's bounce rate is probably pretty high. I would imagine that most people find what they are looking for on a Wikipedia page and do not browse other pages.

        If you have a landing page with an affiliate link, if visitors find your page and click that link it will record as a "bounce", but they did exactly what you wanted them to do.
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  • Profile picture of the author SilenceMedia
    It got +1 value at periodic table by search engine land http://searchengineland.com/seotable/ this is old table but still precisely legit.
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  • Profile picture of the author blackli0n
    Anything longer than 2 seconds is really bad to me. I try to stay under 1.5sec and even under 1 sec if possible. Most marketer sites are simple stuff, mostly text...so there's no reason why you can't hit that. Go get a cheap VPS plan somewhere and use Cloudflare.
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  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    I should have stated in my original response that, although site speed does not seem to be a very strong ranking signal at all in terms of how high a site ranks, it will affect the usability of your site and cause people to bounce. Although Google does not use bounce rates in its algorithm, people can't buy from you when they leave your site, so whether it affects your rankings or not, it certainly won't be beneficial to sales if you have a slow site.
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  • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
    A site's speed plays a small part in the rankings but in my opinion most people are overblowing the speed issue. The fastest sites are not going to rank based on speed but a slow site might drop if its too slow to give the user a good experience.
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