Last April, Google announced that it will use a webpage's site speed (loading time) as a factor towards its overall search rankings. Meaning, slower loading, and slower executing webpages would receive some kind of ranking penalty. Right now, Google considers 3 seconds as being "slow", while 1.5 seconds is considered "average". Anything below 1.5 seconds is considered "fast". I used Google Webmaster Tools to evaluate one of my websites, and it shows an average site speed of 3.2 seconds. Hence, I need to do some work to get that loading time down. One of the things I looked at is QuantCast. That is, I have the QuantCast code in my pages. That code adds only 370 bytes to each of my pages, which is not very much. However, I need to look at EVERYTHING that I can do to make my pages load faster. So I wonder, will companies like QuantCast go out of business due to this new SEO signal? QuantCast, if you don't know, is a traffic analysis company, but is more comparable to Alexa, or Compete.com. It's meant for advertisers to evaluate. But it uses a script that webmasters embed into their pages. I also have Google Analytics in my pages as well. So I'm thinking I should just dump QuantCast. But anyways, there are a lot of companies that produce scripts, widgets, and gadgets that we embed into our websites, mostly for design, sounds, fun and games, that may be slowing down our site speed. And those companies may also go out of business, as webmasters try to speed up their sites. I also wrote an article about this on my blog today... http://www.inyourweb.com/2010/10/will-site-speed-kill-off-quantcast.html
Nice post Steve, I didn't know Google was about to do that and it really sucks. Shared hosting vs a server too. grrrrrrr headed to Google Webmaster tools now. I like lots of pictures. I really don't think this is a good idea Google, I mean my travel sight might be 100 times better than another one without pictures. And large pictures, not crappy little 100K pictures, not for this kind of site. Guess I will have to go to thumbnails only in main post. What am I going to do with the 1000's I already have up though..
One of us doesn't understand. Might be me. What good does it do to have Google index a page different from what you really want indexed? What do you mean cheat it by serving a different page?
I meant google probes your site every ones in a while from certain Ip addresses to test it's speed. By serving a simpler page to those ip addresses you will get a better speed ranking. You do not need serve a different page to google index bot (crawler)
ATX, sounds like good information but you're not giving enough specifics for those that don't already know what your speak of to actually do it. Would like to know more. Thanks!