Website speed affecting SEO (Matt Cutt)

Well this certainly is new, Google's Matt Cutt in his recent interview said that google has never before given importance to speed of website. But now its going to be one of important factor while considering Page Ranking & also Google’s much discussed Algorithm update (Caffeine), which was recently found to begin rolling out soon. Watch out guys google has added new rules to this game triumphing speed over relevant content? Well certainly relevant content will always be the prior thing to take into consideration while Ranking the site but what is there is two sites having same relevant content and backlinks certainly speed will be considered then...seeing that there are over 200 factors influencing Page Ranking, where does Speed matter for Page Ranking in google ranks?

 

Yes i have already told this on this forum.

 

I'm actually glad that they're doing this. It's better for the user. I honestly can't believe that it took them as long as it did to add this.

There's nothing I hate worse when it comes to the internet than a page that takes 2 minutes to load or ends up giving you some stupid error message after you've waited for so long.

If you know how to code your website properly, and have proper hosting, than you should have nothing to worry about as far as ranking goes with page load times.

 

good host provider has advantages. do they now recommend web host?

 

Yeah!! It's going to be a major issue in ranking.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muSIzHurn4U

 

No, but there are some hosting providers out there that are totally lame when it comes to speed. But, it's mainly the coding that matters. If you have a lot of flash on your website along with poor coding and/or hosting, that's probably the worst.

 

Not fair... I am hosted on a cheap crappy server that gets job done... You can't penalize me for this Google...

 

If this is the case, many web site need to be redesign to keep the google ranking and therefore more cost to web site owner.

 

Cool information, I added in my mind.

 

What would rank as being 'slow'? I mean, take a random topic, say 'table's. One site has lots of text about tables, very informative, loads quickly. The next site has lots of text too, but it's also got images on tables, maybe a flash application that shows tables in 3D. It takes 1 second longer to load.

Which one will now receive better rankings? Will flash websites get hit hard under this?

 

Not necessarily. If you think about it, Google will most likely allow for a certain amount of load time. Example, if it takes more than 20 seconds for your page to load (because that IS pretty bad in my opinion), then you will probably be saying bye bye to your rankings.

But yes, I would definitely say that flash sites will get hit the hardest, since they are the worst. Just not the ones that load under w/e the allowed load time will be.

 

I had read somewhere a month back that speed was going to be an important factor, which would be a pain for sites with lots of pictures/widgets on each page! I guess the people who have spent a lot in their servers speed, might gain by this factor.
I always thought that it should be a factor in the algorithm as sometimes it takes a hell lot of time to view a particular page and later some weird message shows up and the window closes by default.. lol!!!

 

This one has its advantages and disadvantages because those who are having high end servers will be experience super fast google page rank status but others would have their rank less than the other sites which have contents less than those. So most people would be facing disadvantages since they own big pages and have large content with larger size.

 

I'm not happy about this choice, maybe not everybody can have money to have a superfast host and for this reason these persons will be penalized?

 

Hopefully mine loads quick enough to meet this Google criterion
Seems fast enough to me...

 

You can help your load speed if you goto
> cpanel scroll down to "software/services"
> then "optimize website" and make sure you set your gzip settings.

i have mine set for

Compress the specified MIME types

Code (markup):

text/html text/plain text/xml text/htm text/shtml text/css

Code (markup):

php i have gziped by my scripts, and all my graphics are already optimized before i upload them.

IN webmaster tools it showed about a 25% speed increase for my site.

 

Google consider fastness to be vital to the web, the company is Considering making web site speed a factor in calculating page rankings.

 

Great info , thanks...

 

I think this is a good step.. afterall increasing quality is good. But small web entrepreneurs, like me, get killed because of this as hosting and other factors (affecting the speed) would have to be sorted out..

 

Heard about this recently but does anyone have an indication when this will start to be taken into the equation ??? Have just started inreasing the server spec on 2 of out servers to 1 gig connection and 8 meg memory each so in theory this should address the problem but at extra expense to the hosting bill every month.