Google: Page Load Speed Plays Important Role in SEO Rankings
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Google cofounder Larry Page has often said that he envisions a web that can be surfed as easily as flipping through the pages of a magazine. So it's no surprise that page load speed is now something measured and used by Googlebot (Google's web crawler) to determine whether or not your website shows up on page 1 of the Google search results people see when looking for what you sell.
Google’s search algorithm now penalizes slow loading websites. Webpage relevancy and recentness still outweigh page load time as a ranking factor in Google's search ranking algorithm, but all other things being equal, how fast your webpage loads can now make or break your page 1 ranking on Google.com searches.
Here Google engineer Matt Cutts explains the algorithm update:
Cutts notes that
"Historically, we haven't had to use it (page load time) in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much. I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about 'how do I have my site be fast, how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom JavaScript?'"
Google has provided a new section on their website to help webmasters adapt to page load time as a ranking factor:
This is all part of Google's new "Make the web faster" effort with a stated goal of encouraging "A 2X Faster Web". The project has been dubbed SPDY, pronounced "speedy". Google's Research Blog notes "SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression."
Google has coined a new word for making webpages load faster:
"MINIFY".
Google has made it easy for us to "minify" JavaScript, css, html, images, etc for better search ranking. You can download Google's new minifying "Page Speed" Firefox plugin here:
Google Speed
Google's Code Blog says "Page Speed's suggestions are based on a set of commonly accepted best practices that we and other websites implement." Page Speed is an open source project, so expect expanding options, functionality, and ease of use improvements over time.
Yahoo! offers something similar called "Yslow":
Yahoo Speed
And don’t forget: Google indirectly penalizes slow-to-load pages because it sees a higher bounce rate when it links to slow-to-load pages in its SERPs. Compounding the issue is Google's recently introduced "real-time results". The quicker Google can crawl your page the better chance that it will appear in the real-time results.
Here at Gainesville Marketing, we suggest you use these new "minify" tools from Google to optimize your page load time for better search ranking.
Want help? Please call or email us if you would to talk to one of our experts about SEO or your own site load speeds.