Speed the next Web site Ranking Component?
November 15, 2009 – 3:29 pm
I saw an interview with Matt Cutts reported on in the last few days that hinted that page loading speed may in the next year become one of the factors for how a website ranks in the search results. Now, to be honest I already suspected that there might be something used in the weighting already that related to page load speed. Why? Well, one of the things google has emphasized in its terms and conditions is the idea of sites that give a good user experience. Pop ups and deceptive redirects for instance are “bad experience” kind of things and affect sites negatively, while you would assume that a fast loading page would be a “good experience” kind of thing and perhaps benefit a site in the search results.
Anyway, along with the interview I saw a link to a new (to me) resource at Google and that is their listing of let’s make the web faster utilities. Some of them are tools from google and others come from other sources, but you may want to make use of any tricks and tools you can to try to improve the speed of your pages.
I could imagine that this would be a fairly simple metric to add to their current ranking algorithm. The main question would be how much the web site page load would be weighted and as you may know, the way the various ranking components are weighted is one of the main reasons the new algorithm changes can dramatically affect search results for keywords. You never know, initially they may rank the speed a bit too important and we may see search results change dramatically initially and then through several search algo updates they may dial the weighting down a bit to where they like it. The only way I see to be in a spot where you should be impervious to this is to make your site as fast loading as possible now and then you’ll avoid the dance between the future algorithm and weighting changes.
Popularity: 24% [?]
You must be logged in to post a comment.