Hey Guys, I think I figured out what gives a great bias to SEO. I noticed a negative trend in one of my sites (I posted about the problem over here). With the feedback gathered there I still had no clear reason why this happened after all. Today I went and checked my google webmasters account and more especially the statistics for a site on which I had google sitemap installed. The site is similar to the one experiencing the problems. They both use xml to fetch data for the affiliate programs they run. The one damaged is in the retail business and the one which is improved is in the hotel industry. Here are the graphs for the hotel site: This is the Total number of crawled pages This is the total downloaded files (KBs) And this is the average access time. As you can see, the moment my site started to go faster, the very same moment google bots crazed about it and almost doubled the crawl from 20k pages per day to 40k pages. If we take this theory and cross check it with the other site which is similar in concept, but is veeery sluggish (the xml which it uses is very slow), and google decreased the crawl and even started to de-index my pages. Now whats very important is that these changes in these two cases started occuring at exactly the same time. So in order to conclude if google started heavily to pay attention to our site's speed, and give bias for this in the SERPS and in the crawl rate, I need someone who has sites with sitemaps, to show the stats like I did so we cross check a bigger frame of cases. Cheers!
if you mean does the number of pages crawled get affected directly by server response speed? no, not in my findings. Check the attached. You can see in the beginning of march the point where i transferred a site to a faster server. Look at the pages crawled etc at the same point. I havent seen any increase, but the spikes do look more stable.
Very insightful. I think there might be some merit to this, as there has been word that Google's next big push will be towards sites that are more user-friendly, and the server speed is certainly one way to measure that.
With my site I have noticed that a site of mine which has sitemap rank higher in SE. But If I remove the sitemap, the pages will still be in G Index, but Lost the Rankings !!! My 10-15 pages were in top 4th position in G when I had XML sitemap, but accidentally during some update, I lost the XML sitemap and my rankings are gone !!! But the pages were in the G Index.
Server glitching would be an unfortunate penalty. As far as I am concerned, an UNFAIR one at that! Things that I find user friendly: Menu on every page User has full control (no pops or interuptions) Large Print (lol) Cached pages don't redirect (not sure how webmasters do this, but it's annoying!) Not too much gloss - hurts the eyes Images that don't BLINK Free stuff that's REAL and you don't have to buy a membership to Columbia House or a Clickbank Product OR GIVE EMAIL..