I have a subdomain for an online coloring book product that I sell. I'm trying to improve it's SEO profile, and one thing that might be a concern is the page-load time. Because I want to "show off" the coloring book, I have it embedded right there in the first page. The SWF file is 500K, and the coloring page it loads adds another 50K. On a good connection, with nothing cached it might take 4-5 seconds to load. Once it's cached the SWF, naturally it's much faster. That's not a problem for a human, but I think the Googlebot takes load-time into consideration, so should I be concerned from an SEO point of view? I can think of a couple of work-arounds, but need some advice/feedback... 1. Load the SWF via javascript. I figure that Google probably only times the loading of the HTML, plus images, css etc that are directly linked in. So perhaps if I make the SWF loaded via Javascript, the bot won't see it, and therefore won't count it in the load time. 2. Tell Googlebot not to get the SWF Is there some way, perhaps through the robots file to tell the bot to not load the SWF? 3. Use an animated GIF in it's place. Maybe this is an option. To make it nice it's still going to be around 150K, but that's better than 500K. So, what do you think? Is there a way I can find out how Googlebot views my page, and it's perception of the load-time? Thanks!
to keep thing simple Page load time is like . when you go to buy a hotdog or burger . and you got to wait 5 min for your food . so a fast and good outlet will get more customer . i was at the devfest from google - and during the event we see some study on page load speed and it show that eveyr sec you take to load a page you lose 13% of possible viewer or customer . so is simple .. provide good and fast service you get the cream
Well I guess that partly answers the title question of how important it is, but you are mainly talking about human visitors. I accept that that's important, but what I'm currently concerned about is how bots (especially Googlebot) see it - and then trying to figure out how best to make them see it favourably!
the google bot , if i recall correctly crawl on the text and the sitemap as well as the text on your site . you can make a search on google about how google bot work and crawl their tons of info out there already .
The problem also i guess is the server if you are on a shared server you website will be slower and there not much you can do about it. If you have a dedicated server you website will be faster for sure.