Originally posted 2010-04-12 07:00:00.
We have been hearing of news lately that Google is going to start factoring in website loading speed in web search ranking. When all things equal, a site that loads fast will appear higher in the search results than a site that loads slow.
Google just posted on their Webmaster Central blog that they in fact implemented this on a small percentage of websites already.
Google is obsessed with speed when it comes to web search. They also believe that a faster site improves user experience and they tend to spend more time in site that is speedy. They also have studies to prove this little fact.
Although they have announced site speed as a signal in web search ranking, they say
While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.
However, even if your Google search ranking isn’t affected, it always a good thing to make sure your site loads fast but reducing the number of images it loads, compressing javascript, CSS, reducing number of database queries, etc.
And there are a number of tools to help you do that.
Tools to Improve Site Speed
- Firebug Firefox add-on Net Panel
- YSlow Firefox add-on
- Page Speed Firefox add-on
- WebPageTest
- Google Webmaster Tools, Labs –> Site Performance
Plus, many other resources at http://code.google.com/speed/.
Make your websites load fast and enjoy positive user experience as well as a little boost in your Google search ranking when Google makes this a standard signal for all websites.
[via Webmaster Central]
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