Google confirm that the speed of our website influences search engine ranking algorithms

Posted by: Krishna De | Posted on: April 20th, 2010 | 63 Comments | Posted in: Digital Marketing, Marketing online, Technology

It’s official – Google does take note of the speed of our websites in their search ranking algorithms i.e. how quickly our website responds to search requests.

In a recent article Google comments that in their internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there so they have decided to take site speed into account in their search rankings.

They also list a number of tools that we can use to evaluate the speed of our website:

Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement
YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed
WebPagetest which gives a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist
Google Webmaster Tools (Labs > Site Performance) which shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below
Google Code webspeed tools.

So when you are next talking to your webmaster you might want to talk to them about how to speed up your website to help your search engine ranking – I know I will be talking to mine!

However while the speed of our website is important for users and search engine rankings, Google advises that the relevance of the content on the page is more important. Here is a video from Matt Cutts of Google explaining about the importance of website speed and relevance of content.

If you have managed to speed up your website what actions have you taken?

Is the addition of social media widgets perhaps making our sites more engaging but slower to load and is it time to re-evaluate our sites? Come on all your SEO experts what do you think?

search engine ranking

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http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/ Dave Davis

We use them all.
Combine CSS and External JS files.
Make sure Gzip compression is turned on/installed on your server.

Use Yslow and smushit to optimize images.

Use GA Asynchronous Tracking.

Use WP-Supercache when possible.

Use a CDN.

Cache your gravatars/turn feature off.

Was going to write a blog post on it bnut there’s been so many. Maybe one for the Irish?
http://www.mneylon.com/blog/ Michele

Every external resource (eg. widget) can slow down a site loading significantly, as it increases the number of DNS calls and also a lot of those widgets seem to be slow to render anyway.
We’ve been tweaking our main site a bit over the last couple of weeks to try and remove as many of these as possible eg. replacing the Facebook widget with a static image hosted on our own site etc., etc.
I haven’t had a chance to look at the stuff that Google has been talking about recently, but I strongly suspect that a lot of people’s sites could be sped up by using smaller images.
Krishna De

@Dave thanks for your thoughts – yes do do a blog post – we non technical people would find it helpful as would marketing managers trying to get to grips with digital marketing!

@Michele thank for sharing what you are doing – great suggestions about not relying on widgets.

I am now wondering would the same go for adding online video to your site from third party sites such as YouTube? And what about adding things like Facebook Connect?

This suggests there is a fine balance between making your site social and interactive and one that works well in terms of useability and loads fast to help you with search engine ranking.
Pingback: Google confirm that the speed of our website influences search engine ranking algorithms » Glasgorman Computer Services, Gorey, Wexford, Ireland
Andy_l

This is an appreciable move on Google’s front which will certainly help in keeping pace with the growing competition. Some of the recently launched open source search platforms like Solr implement such mechanisms (search engine algos) along with some advanced indexing techniques.
http://twitter.com/carlhaggerty/status/12575592809 Carl Haggerty

Google confirm that the speed of our website influences search engine ranking algorithms http://j.mp/bjqYKl #socitm #localgov
http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/ Dave Davis

I’d highly recommend reading this post and more importantly watching teh ENTIRE video in this blog post:

http://seogadget.co.uk/improving-site-speed-talk-about-the-business-benefit/

It should be required reading for anyone interested in this topic.
http://twitter.com/theanand/status/12632299168 Anand Subramanian

Disagree: Google confirm that the speed of our website influences search engine ranking algorithms. http://is.gd/bC3dk Do you?
http://twitter.com/sythoos/status/12633047420 Mr.Sajith

RT @theanand: Disagree: Google confirm that the speed of our website influences search engine ranking algorithms. http://is.gd/bC3dk Do you?
http://twitter.com/iamatechie/status/12633292076 Sanil Subhash Chandr

RT @TheAnand: Disagree: Google confirm that the speed of our website influences search engine ranking algorithms. http://is.gd/bC3dk Do you?
http://twitter.com/scariapaul/status/12636147095 Jobin Paul Elenjikal

RT @TheAnand: Disagree: Google confirm that the speed of our website influences search engine ranking algorithms. http://is.gd/bC3dk Do you?
http://primaryposition.com David Quaid

It is definitely a confirmed and measurable signal which will have a definite albeit small effect on a website. The problem is that on its own its not going to help and if you have a badly optimised site AND/OR low authority, this won’t improve it.

If you are running a website from your home on a GPRS connection, then you have something to worry about but if you host in Ireland and you host with any of the big reputable hosting companies and you’re not loading hundreds of slow objects, then this is going to be the biggest non-news story of 2010 in Internet Marketing for you…

It will however appeal to people who will now claim that their fast loading website is somehow fully optimised – and that the sad part – people will continue to ignore content, connectivity, authority and concentrate on things like page load and meta-tags because they are simpler to understand if at the end of the day utterly unimportant.
http://twitter.com/priyeshdas/status/12685967199 dass

RT @theanand: Disagree: Google confirm that the speed of our website influences search engine ranking algorithms. http://is.gd/bC3dk Do you?
http://twitter.com/ciara_hewett/status/12908091176 Ciara Hewett

Reading: http://twitthis.com/66wdcw
http://twitter.com/ciara_hewett/status/12908219625 Ciara Hewett

Search Engine Ranking – check out your website speed as a factor – http://twitthis.com/66wdcw
http://www.hal9000.ie Jennie

Great tools – another one can be found at tools.pingdom.com.

But I wonder how Google will view the load time on sites where the first page renders, but is only an ‘enter’ page? So the page loads pretty quickly as there’s not much happening on it.

For example, if you go to Dunne and Crescenzi’s site, it’s got a fancy (if tedious) intro, but your tummy could be rumbling by the time you get to see a menu page!
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Krishna,nnThis recent Google Webmaster channel provides some more insight into speed and SERPS.nnParaic
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Krishna,nnThis recent Google Webmaster channel provides some more insight into speed and SERPS.nnParaic
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Krishna,nnThis recent Google Webmaster channel provides some more insight into speed and SERPS.nnParaic
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Krishna,nnThis recent Google Webmaster channel provides some more insight into speed and SERPS.nnParaic
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Krishna,nnThis recent Google Webmaster channel provides some more insight into speed and SERPS.nnParaic
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Krishna,nnThis recent Google Webmaster channel provides some more insight into speed and SERPS.nnParaic
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Krishna,nnThis recent Google Webmaster channel provides some more insight into speed and SERPS.nnParaic
http://twitter.com/paraic Paraic Hegarty

Krishna,nnThis recent Google Webmaster channel provides some more insight into speed and SERPS.nnParaic
http://twitter.com/paraic Paraic Hegarty

Krishna,nnThis recent Google Webmaster channel provides some more insight into speed and SERPS.nnParaic
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Krishna,nnThis recent Google Webmaster channel provides some more insight into speed and SERPS.nnParaic
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Krishna,nnThis recent Google Webmaster channel provides some more insight into speed and SERPS.nnParaic
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Krishna,nnThis recent Google Webmaster channel provides some more insight into speed and SERPS.nnParaic
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Krishna,nnThis recent Google Webmaster channel provides some more insight into speed and SERPS.nnParaic
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Krishna,

This recent Google Webmaster channel provides some more insight into speed and SERPS.

Paraic

Google confirm that the speed of our website influences search engine ranking algorithms

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