Google Adds Site Speed to Search Ranking
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Image by AdrianTNT
One of Google Chrome’s biggest draw is its speed. Its constantly growing number of users easily finds value in the efficiency and the convenience it affords them. This same focus on speed can also be seen in other Google products and services; and this month, the Internet search mogul has applied it to its search ranking algorithms. This, the company has announced through a blog post by Google Fellow Amit Singhal and Principal Engineer Matt Cutts on the official Google Webmaster Central Blog.
Site speed basically reflects how quickly a website responds to Web requests. The efficiency a fast site affords definitely contributes significantly to the user experience, as seen from a Google internal study conducted in mid-2009.
Needless to say, when a site is slow on the response, the lesser the time visitors will spend on it which can lead to lesser site traffic. There is also a chance that you’ll be seeing its potential revenues and site traffic trickling south-bound. Following shortly, your campaign’s mapped out strategies may start losing their value - from the information distribution to possible promotions. And you know this will reflect on your brand’s reputation.
Two elements factor heavily on this: the current trend of a continuously increasing demand for information and the majority of Internet user’s short attention span.
“Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed - that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.” the blog post stated. “We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”
Aside from the array of Google homegrown tools, the company lists a handful of other applications available for the site owner, Webmaster or author to evaluate the speed of their site. These include the Firefox / Firebug add-on Page Speed which evaluates a site’s performance and offers suggestions for improvement; YSlow, a Yahoo tool which suggests ways to improve site speed; and WebPagetest, a Web service that produces reports and charts on your site’s load performance and yields an optimization checklist.
While site speed may be relevant and is established as a new signal, Google, however, assures that it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. As of writing, less than 1% of search queries are actually affected by the implementation of site speed and even then it only applies for visitors searching in English on the search engine.
Nevertheless, Google encourages site owners to start gauging their site’s speed using the aforementioned tools as starting points, “- not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.”
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RSpears @ April 11, 2010
