Site Speed Officially Used In Search Engine Rankings, Says Google

You've probably heard that site speed is now one of the more than 200 factors that Google is using to rank search engine results

. The reactions range from, "Everybody panic!" to "This will make it easier for the big sites to stomp the smaller ones," to "Well it's about time." I actually don't think that most smaller sites are going to suffer because of this change.

Sure, the big guys can afford to have their sites hosted on faster, dedicated servers, but some of the worst sites when it comes to speed are sites of big cheeses, particularly those who sell expensive things. You can see in the screen shot the yawn-inducing graphic you have to sit through before you can actually do anything on one such site (a luxury watchmaker). If anything, it will be the sites that are electronic monuments to big egos that are going to suffer most. There are a lot of users like me who see that "Loading, please wait" widget as the perfect reason to click the "Back" button. If you read Matt Cutts' blog post for April 9, you'll learn the reasoning behind Google's decision, and why Cutts doesn't think it's going to be that big a deal. Here's a recap.

Why Matt Cutts Doesn't Think It's Going to Be That Big a Deal -Your site will depend much more on factors like reputation, relevance, and quality of content, and compared to these factors, site speed will be a relatively small factor in your ranking. -Less than 1% of queries will change now that site speed is incorporated into the ranking algorithm. In terms of search results, there shouldn't be a noticeable difference because the average SERP only shows about 10 results. -Google actually launched this feature a few weeks ago and few people even noticed. -Google has a whole mini-site dedicated to speeding up your site with plenty of resources and teaching videos about how to do it. -Small sites are often quicker to respond to this kind of change on the theory that it's easier to turn around a tugboat than the Titanic. -And finally, most websites can be made faster with fairly simple fixes, which improves conversion rates and ROI.

Tips for Speeding Up Site: Add a cache plugin to your site. It creates static versions of posts so that the pages don't have to be recreated every time from scratch. Instead, an HTML file, perhaps with javascript for dynamic elements is displayed, which is faster for users. Other suggestions for speeding up your page, which you can read more about at code.google.com, include:

-Reducing size of responses, cached pages, and downloads (minimizing payload) -Reducing upload size (minimizing request overhead) -Reducing the number of serial request / response cycles (minimizing round-trip to the server times) -Improving your layout (optimizing browser rendering).

by: Julie Johnson

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