In a blog post yesterday, Matt Cutts explains how Google is now incorporating site speed as one of the over 200 signals that they use to determine search rankings.
Don’t panic! As Matt Cutts also explains, Google actually launched this already a few weeks back and nobody noticed anything. Fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into the ranking algorithm.
Google also provides you with a bunch of tools to help make the web faster.
While you may think that big companies now automatically gain an advantage, you should remember that smaller companies often can “change things” faster than big companies, when it comes to setting up faster servers or optimizing websites – according to Matt Cutts.
Ultimately, Google wants what’s best for the users – faster websites. This news may not be good for everybody, right now, but I’m sure down the road, we will all appreciate this.
Once again, Google shows how they are the Internet.
While many are skeptic about this move and once again playing it small, I think that ultimately site speed will be a very important factor when determining search engine rankings. Google has always been, on “better user experience”. The faster your site loads, the better for its users. So I am definitely start on deleting some of my not so important plugins and monitor my sites performance closely.
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Yo DiTesco. Your site loads fast enough for me already, but I don’t know if there’s something to improve on, in the eyes of Google 🙂 Best of luck, though.
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Hmm. Google does these things that you just don’t expect. At least speed isn’t a big deal for me. I hope no one got too hurt when they changed it. I know it’s only 1%, but those count too. I guess patience is going to become a long forgotten virtue.
As long as Google doesn’t hurt the little guy too much, I guess this is a (fairly) good thing. No one knows what patience is anymore.
I think this is a good move. Google is trying to improve the end users experience a very slow site is a pain in the …
I have a Zopim ‘live chat’ gadget on one of our sites which slows things down which is kinda worrying me now.
Ralph
This is a nice step forward for Google. As you mentioned, an overwhelming majority of people won’t be affected. However, I don’t mind a penalty for those sites that are so sluggish that users simply abandon them within seconds due to the wait.
Seems pretty logical to me. But at the same time, it’s not going to affect most people (as mentioned in the article). It’ll definitely help weed out those sites that really are slow and sluggish. Personally, it makes me mad when I actually have to sit there and wait for a site to load due to too much “crap”, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
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My blog got a bad speed, although only give the effect 1% this is can not be underestimated. Looks like I need to improve loading speed of my blog
Thank you for this information