Posted by christefano on April 10, 2010 at 10:40am
It's no surprise that site speed offers visitors a better experience, but Google just announced that site speed is now a factor in search rankings. I think this has actually been true for some time, but it's worth mentioning here. This is definitely another feather in the hats of performance specialists who offer high performance tuning services to their clients.
Comments
Any reasonably load time is fine
From the page linked above, "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."
Just like most other aspects of SEO, if you concentrate on making your site a good experience for the users, SEO value tends to follow. So, make sure your site is fast enough to use. If you don't, you search results won't matter anyway!
Ken Winters
Arnab Nandi has an
Arnab Nandi has an interesting take on speed as a factor in ranking.
I can tell you that there is
I can tell you that there is a difference. I played aorund with the website of my company and so far the difference between 2 seconds load time and 0.8 seconds load time is 4 pages in the search results. The more competition on a keyword is the more will this small part of the ranking algorithm count in I think.
Remember: I compute you!
But as with all things SEO,
But as with all things SEO, it's more speculation than science. It has to be taken with a grain of salt. It may or may not matter. In an ideal world rankings would solely be based off the quality of the content, but unfortunately there are these other more technical influences that are impossible to measure how they influence the results.
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Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his