Google Algo Change How Much Will Speed Matter

[Scottsdale SEO Solutions]

With the official announcement this week by Google that speed matters so what's next? How important will this update become over time? How difficult will it be to implement? These are a few of the questions that need to be asked and properly answered.

 

[mneylon]

How are they going to measure speed? ie. speed based on what exactly?

 

[jmcc]

How are they going to measure speed? ie. speed based on what exactly?

Not sure how they even measure speed at the moment. There's a section in the Google Webmaster Tools diagnostics (Crawl Stats) that shows the average time taken to download a page. The page speeds for HosterStats vary from a high of 1597 mS to a low of 334 mS. The average was 645. However this is over a few months and when I enabled compression on the site, the dowload time dropped to a low of 334 mS and it has remained around there. The high spikes are during the first few days of each month. But this is just the time Googlebot spends on downloading pages and it doesn't necessarily equate to website speed. Perhaps enabling content compression on a website will give it an advantage if Google is using this simple method of evaluating a website's speed. However Google might go for a more complex way of measuring website speed.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Scottsdale SEO Solutions]

Here is the articles link Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Using site speed in web search ranking. The appear to be measuring a pages load times. It only affects website in the US. Currently that is limited to about 1 % of the market.

 

[gbonnet]

They clearly mention that they'll consider website's speed against other websites so the problem will be to load faster than competition.

Another problem that they don't mention in their article is : do they check a ratio "word count" / speed ?
A page that has a big textual content will obviously take longer to load than a page containing only a paragraph ... but should not be penalised by this since it's providing rich content.

I assume they'll tell more later.

 

[Scottsdale SEO Solutions]

They clearly mention that they'll consider website's speed against other websites so the problem will be to load faster than competition.

Another problem that they don't mention in their article is : do they check a ratio "word count" / speed ?
A page that has a big textual content will obviously take longer to load than a page containing only a paragraph ... but should not be penalised by this since it's providing rich content.

I assume they'll tell more later.

You brought some interesting points here. I had not considered the pages size in all of this. The problems that I'm seeing is files loading slowly with things like CSS and images being big problems for many. At least its somethink different to discuss.

 

[ADVERTISINGGUERRILLA]

A page that has a big textual content will obviously take longer to load than a page containing only a paragraph ... but should not be penalised by this since it's providing rich content.
.

It will be images rather than words effecting speed.

I don't think there will be a huge importance placed on speed. Just more than now.

 

[Scottsdale SEO Solutions]

I found this helpful video on Google's Webmaster Central blog that sheds from light on speed.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: You and site performance, sitting in a tree...

 

[FlightCenter]

Honestly it's always been about Content (On Page SEO) and Off page seo (backlinks). If your website is very slow then users won't want to use it anyway. Just make sure your site loads at a decent rate and you should be fine for rankings.

 

[jimmyx]

With the official announcement this week by Google that speed matters so what's next? How important will this update become over time? How difficult will it be to implement? These are a few of the questions that need to be asked and properly answered.

It depends on how fast your page loads up.How important it is, not doubt there are many factors involved in deciding your ranking, load speed is considered only one of them.So everyone is important.

 

[Scottsdale SEO Solutions]

It depends on how fast your page loads up.How important it is, not doubt there are many factors involved in deciding your ranking, load speed is considered only one of them.So everyone is important.

I would like to suggest that you watch the video. It makes a very compelling presentation on the need for speed.

 

[jimmyx]

Honestly it's always been about Content (On Page SEO) and Off page seo (backlinks). If your website is very slow then users won't want to use it anyway. Just make sure your site loads at a decent rate and you should be fine for rankings.

You install W3

 

[jimmyx]

Honestly it's always been about Content (On Page SEO) and Off page seo (backlinks). If your website is very slow then users won't want to use it anyway. Just make sure your site loads at a decent rate and you should be fine for rankings.

You can install W3 Total Cahce plugin to increase your load speed.