29th
December
2009
Before Google’s announcement that the speed at which your site loads for visitors “matters”, we’d all heard it said repeatedly that it did NOT matter for organic rankings, but that it may someday, and it seems that day arrived early last month.
When I rolled out the SEO Automatic review, I chose to include the checking of site compression, and showing file sizes, even though the collective wisdom of the SEO industry was that your page load time was only a factor for your Google Adwords Quality Score, and for the user experience, but it was not an organic ranking factor.
At Pubcon last month, in my web hosting presentation, I talked for the third year in a row about speeding up your website. My logic was that what’s good for visitors was good for the search engines, and nobody wanted to sit around and wait for a page to load.
Near the end of my slides, I said I was predicting Google would make page speed a factor very soon, and the very next afternoon, the announcement was made by Matt Cutts that they now were. Am I a heretic? Hardly – others had been saying the same thing for a while already.
So, now that speed “officially” matters, Google is further stressing the importance by adding info to Google Webmaster Tools, and here’s a 4 minute video I made showing you what they’ve done, and their Firefox tools as well.
Other stuff I've written:
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Search Engine Reports says:
I was pretty shocked when I used GWT to check this. Some sites which I expected to perform poorly did ‘76% better than other sites’ and vice versa.
Do you think CODE LOCATION plays a factor in rankings? For example, links toward bottom of code are perceived as less weighted? Just curious on what your thoughts were on that.
THanks for the video.
Buenos Aires travel says:
Interesting point, we’ll have to start taking care of this issue too. Thanks for the info!