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Google will factor page load speed into search result rankings
Google sure seems hung up on the speed of the web these days, and I have to say, I like it. After announcing the SPDY protocol they're working on to speed up page loading time, it has come out that Google is seriously considering using page loading time as a factor when returning search results. This isn't some unsubstantiated rumor, either; it comes from none other than Matt Cutts, the high-profile Google employee who works on Google's web spam team.
Cutts said that the directive to speed up searching comes right from the top, Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. According to Search Engine Land he said they want searching to be as fast as flipping through a magazine.
At first blush it seems counter to Google's accuracy goals to favor fast pages over slow pages when a slow page might be more relevant to a user's search, but I know that I have often not even bothered letting a slow page finish loading when I was busy searching for something specific. If Google can shield me from the slow sites, it will help me find what I'm looking for more quickly.
Of course, now I have to do something about the slowness of my personal blog. But I probably should have long ago.
[Photo by chrisscott]
Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsDeoWulfNov 14th 2009 4:34PM
Or it could be a subversive push for people to adopt their protocol...
Kishore MylavarapuNov 14th 2009 11:03PM
It is a odd news for whole web bloggers.We all should went for Html pages then..
scarabicNov 17th 2009 11:45AM
SEOs have known for years that Google factors in page performance two ways:
1) The slower your site responds, the less aggressively they crawl it. Googlebot is often a large plurality of traffic on many sites, and Google knows they need to be careful about strangling the very sites they're trying to index. That said, if they put you on a less aggressive crawl, you're going to have fewer URL in their index, period.
2) Secondly, they rank slow sites lower. This is just a simple user experience point. If all the sites returned by Google took 8 seconds to respond to your click, you'd eventually get frustrated with Google for steering you to sites that don't work well. It only makes sense for Google to reward fast sites, and they do.
"not some unsubstantiated rumor" indeed. This has been a well known fact for a long time.
WebdreamJan 8th 2010 1:35PM
I'm worried about how this could effect page design...
So in a sense will we be punished for coming up with creative designs using more media that essentially takes longer to load? Will this lead to generic white pages because people are worried about page rank on google?
I wish that google could come up with a way to rank better design higher up! I don't mind if the page takes a little longer to load if it is appealing to look at.