Comments on: Google May Now Consider Page Load Time In Its Ranking Algorithm

By: Cemil

Cemil — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:04:05 +0000

The speed of a website may be a good element to consider in SEO and I’d be very interested on how search engines would go about implementing it.

I believe that many people online, especially in the blogging world have already realized the great impact on the user experience of pages loading quicker and websites functioning better. For example, this has also led to a rise in SEO themes which are making great use of optimized code.

By: Janice

Janice — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:46:44 +0000

Thanks for the clarification. I agree, the web needs to be fast and the first step is getting the webmasters to speed up their websites.

By: Rob Mangiafico

Rob Mangiafico — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:46:51 +0000

Good questions Janice! I doubt Google will use the Google toolbar stats as their metric for any SEO considerations. I’m guessing that if they choose to have this as another factor in ranking, it will be based on their crawler recording additional information for consideration.

Google has another reason for this new tool – They believe that to improve the internet as a whole, it should be faster. They want to shed light on this issue, and they figure the easiest way to get webmasters to make their sites faster (through better coding and practices) is to make this data available in Webmaster Tools.

Remember this is only a snapshot of speed relative to what Google is measuring. And it’s only an experimental “lab” tool meaning Google is simply “playing” at this point. If/when they decide to make this an official metric, I’m sure there will be defined standards and a better approach to measuring site speed.

By: Janice

Janice — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:31:28 +0000

I went to Google’s Webmaster Tools after reading your blog to check it out. I was disappointed to find my site was rated as “SLOW” especially when most feedback I get is the opposite. The sample pages were all ShopSite backend pages, which I know are slow and I have no control over, besides who sees them but me. Also listed was my main “test” page, again, I’m experimenting on that one and don’t expect it to be fast. Then I moved down to the next list of sample pages, they were all ones I routinely check whenever I make a change. Over all I found that work needs to be done and the tips were very helpful.

So digging deeper in trying to understand how this new feature works, I discover the following in the “About Performance” section:

“Page load time is the total time from the moment the user clicks on a link to your page until the time the entire page is loaded and displayed in a browser. It is collected directly from users who have installed the Google Toolbar and have enabled the optional PageRank feature.”

So now it makes sense as to why I’m seeing the backend pages instead the most visited pages of my website! My concern is how will these stats even be accurate and how can they even be considered in the ranking process when most people searching the web are non-web developers and don’t even know what a PageRank is and have no reason to enable the optional toolbar?

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:31:30 +0000

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by CRM_Metrix: RT @LexiConn_Inc ~Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web ~ http://bit.ly/6RaSXa #mr #crm…

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Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:22:42 +0000

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