I have noticed a new features in my Google webmaster section "Site performance" How fast is your website soon will effect your Google pagerank as Google will favour faster websites rather than slower once. I think one of my websites is slow according to Google 3.9 I will try to make it faster, it should be in the Green not the red Tell us how fast is your website, upload image and share your speed??
I think these are new features in Google webmaster account, you must have one. The whole section which is called Labs has 4 new features which are very good, see image
Mine also in the same area. The strange part is if you looking on crawling stats, it also shows the average time took to download the page. There I see it 3-4 times faster. I installed Firebug for FireFox. This plug-in can test site speed, shows time it took to process different elements of your page and give some suggestions how to improve. But, recently I watched video with Matt Cutts and he made it clear that site speed will not impact drastically on PR. If 2 site have same unique content, same quality, same relevance, only then the one which is faster will be returned before the other one. So, don't struggle with site speed. Content is #1, site speed and just one parameter out of 200 which impact search results.
is this really true? my question is if it affects my page rank would it also affect my keyword rankings?
I don't think this will affect the PR but it may have some impact on your rankings. At the end of the day, users still prefer sites that load faster =)
I think it will, as Google rating websites on contents, popularity, relevance, why not speed. Users like faster websites so is Google. I think Google will show the faster websites in its search rather than the slower once. Lets look at this; website A vs B A= Good contents, good backlinks, well optimized, fast B= Good contents, good backlinks, well optimized, slow which one will Google prefer and select in its search results???
Yes, users like faster website and Google is getting more and more user-friendly, so Google will show the faster website before the slower one.
In my opinion, just the site slow could not being effected for both PR and ranking. But, if site has a lot of downtime due to host unstable then it could effect your ranking for sure. Google wants to make sure the result they are showing do works and not just a bad link, back doors page or a down one.
My main site also shows in the 'slow' area, but wont your load speed slow if you have images and such on your page? So this will tend to lean towards text only type sites? whatever, for me my page loads basically instantly, so the webmaster tools have to be off. My 'score' is also not that far off from google.com
You can speed up your website by using gzip. Using gzip will reduce the page size by up to 70%. If you have a look at yahoo home page its over 100KB but it loads faster, so i don't agree to have text only website. Not all hosting companies support gzip specially if you using shared or cheap hosting. Let us know if you know cheap host which support gzip.
Thats pretty cool, I didn't know about that feature. I just signed up not too long ago though. Thanks
i am not agree with that cause you said that it may impact on ranking but rankings are base on back links and PR is also base on link popularity and if it is impact on ranking then it may affect on PR too
I think the main reason can be it decreases traffic and increases bounce rate. If your website has more bounce rate then your site performance is not good as well.
A lots of people said that website speed may effect your Google PageRank. But I'm not sure whether this is true.
I prefer to listen to Google spokesman rather then to what lot of people are speculating. Just watch this short video about site speed and I'm sure it will answer most of your questions: http://bit.ly/bO2r3s Site speed is just small factor out of 200 other factors, and site relevance and content are much much more important.
Yes you are right, I had heard and read this in the month of January, just couple of weeks after the last pagerank update. I guess Google has put this a new feature. As for example I myself, while surfing other sites, dont wait, if the page loads very slow.
As I said in a previous post, page rank will not be available anymore in the near future ( this is what I know ) so why do we really bother so much about it?