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Website Speed - Google's New Ranking Factor. Check if Your Site is Fast Enough. |
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Website Speed - Google's New Ranking Factor. Check if Your Site is Fast Enough. |
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Views: 1887
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Thread Tools | Rate Thread |
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#1
11-27-2009, 07:34 PM
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Website Speed - Google's New Ranking Factor. Check if Your Site is Fast Enough.
There's been a lot of news heading our way from Google recently. First they unveil the test version of a new search architecture called Google Caffeine. Then Caffeine goes live on one data center to be fully rolled out right after the coming holidays. And now we get to know that Google is about to inject a new ranking factor into the algorithm – site speed. This is huge news for anyone with a website so let's take a closer look.
The news came from Matt Cutts, head of Google's anti-spam team. In an interview to WebProNews Matt said: “If you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much”. What this means is that Google will be pushing faster sites higher in the search results, whereas slower sites will find it harder to rank. When does speed factor go into play? There's no official statement from Google yet as to when site speed will be introduced as a ranking factor. It seems reasonable for Google to roll out the new factor together with Google Caffeine which goes live in early 2010. The whole Caffeine update is mostly about speed: indexing speed, speed of generating search results and the overall experience of fast search. So it makes sense for Google to introduce the speed ranking factor in Caffeine. In fact it doesn't really matter when exactly Google starts using the speed factor. What matters is whether you'll be ready for the game changer. Since we've got the early news, there's enough time for you to check your site's load time and make the necessary changes before the shift in the algo takes place. And here's how you can do it. Is your website fast enough? Obviously, website speed can't be treated as an absolute metric. The average site load time will largely depend on the niche. For example photo stocks and video sites will generally take more time to load then, say, news blogs and text-oriented websites. So, site speed is a relative metric that can only be applied to competing sites in one niche. You shouldn't really bother to become the fastest site on the planet. What you really should care about is whether your site's loading speed catches up with the competition. Check Your Site's Speed It's only been a couple of days since we heard the news about the whole speed factor thing and there's already a special tool out there that lets you check your site's loading time and compare it against the 10 top ranked websites for your keywords. It's WebSite Auditor, an onpage optimization tool by Link-Assistant.Com This SEO tool is designed for onpage optimization and top 10 analysis. It allows you to analyze top 10 ranked websites for your niche so that you can get a better idea why these guys rank on top and what onpage optimization tactics you can borrow from them to make your content work better. The new version of the tool also lets you run a quick speed test to see how your website stacks up to the competition (this feature is available in the free version of the tool). I ran a sample check for site-reference.com using the keyword "search engine optimization articles" and here're the results. Similar Threads:
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#2
11-27-2009, 07:34 PM
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As you can clearly see the loading time of
site-reference.com is almost 40% faster than the competition's average. It does lose a bit to a couple of websites on the list but the overall site's performance is excellent. It means that the coming change should give site-reference.com a push in the rankings.And what about your site?
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