Google's New Ranking Policy for 2010

Google?s Matt Cutts hinted that site speed is important to Google, and it may be considered a factor when ranking websites in 2010.

Here is an excerpt from the interview: "Historically, we haven't had to use it(site load speed) in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it's sort of fair to say that 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".

Lat year Google had already introduced Page Load Time as a ranking element in Google Adwords ads.

You can watch the video interview of Matt Cutts here :
http://videos.webpronews.com/2009/11/13/matt-cutts-interview/


How to optimize site for better loading and performance :

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ has added a new section in the ?Labs? menu titled ?Site Performance?. This new feature provides statistics about how fast your web pages load, how that speed compares to other websites, and tips and suggestions for speeding up your page loads.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/introducing-google-public-dns.html is yet another tool Google has released for webmasters to increase their site performance.

Google recently released http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/, an add-on for Firefox browsers which can diagnose a number of elements which impact page load times (such as Javascript and CSS files, image file sizes, etc).

Additionally Google has released http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-analytics-launches-asynchronous.html that allows the GA tracking code to be loaded asynchronously, which also helps reduce the load time of your webpages.

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/11/introducing-closure-tools.html is yet another tool launched by Google to optimize scripts and remove un-necessary whitespaces thereby helping the site to load faster.

All this is in addition to http://code.google.com/speed/ where you can find many more tips & tricks to make sure your site loads as fast as possible. This isn't just important to protect your search engine rankings, it's also a vital part of conversion rate optimisation - users don't like to wait, and a slow site will lose customers.

Hope this helps
Blackhat_Boy

Finally, the guys who have a dedicated server for this own website will get a small bonus from google!

thanks G

Sounds like those who use free sites, like 000webhost, are going to pay for this. I have one 000webhost.com site myself.

I don't this of this being an issue at all, since 2002, it's been published over and over again that the faster a site loads the higher percentage a person stays at site to read. ( google wants a good user experience ). back in the day 6 seconds was the rule of thumb where you would start loosing people, now I personally feel that it's about 4 seconds.

So quick and simple suggestions I can offer:
first off, after you designed your site, use the estimator feature and work with 4 seconds of load time on dial-up 56K. spin off the site color And formating into a css file. now that it's working fine bug free and looking good go to...

step 2: do a quick source code formatting ( keep the code in order ), remove all white spaces, extra line spaces. this should save you about 2% of space and speed your code up slightly.... from now on, this is you main code for the site, changes happen here, and you can directly upload this. But you want more speed don't you ... on to ...

step three: get back into the code, remove all the code note's, and run a code compression ( they are cheap and I think source-forge has one also ), that will compress the code even further.

Scine I am a firm believer that images tell part of the story, I'm real careful about what I do with the images, sometimes I prefer to shrink an image size ( height x width ) than to reduce the image quality.

beond that make sure that gzip compression is working on the server.

there are other tricks, but I can not recal what the right steps are to make them work.

Billy Good

yeah the funny thing is that

a) removing whitespace and reformatting your code will save you 5%-10% at max and will make your html code harder to read.

b) enabling gzip compression will save you 90%

so do not warry about little things, just enable server side compression if you can

After your site is done all you need to do is run your site thru

analyze.websiteoptimization.com

It'll tell you what you need to do.

I always thought they might go this route. Also, they should reward people for html & css clean pages.

alex1 said:

yeah the funny thing is that

a) removing whitespace and reformatting your code will save you 5%-10% at max and will make your html code harder to read.

b) enabling gzip compression will save you 90%

so do not warry about little things, just enable server side compression if you can

Click to expand...

that's why I labeled to steps, one for your development station and one for uploading

bigwali said:

I always thought they might go this route. Also, they should reward people for html & css clean pages.

Click to expand...

completely agreed. after all, clean code often makes the user experience better as well

The funny thing is that the people who need it the most are on shared hosting where they do not have access to a lot of this stuff.

One of the problems is that web optimization is sometimes almost as black an art as SEO. There are so many things that can affect your speed. Some are server side .. queries in particular. Others are client side. Some are related to your transmission. There is no point shelling out big bucks for big-iron if you are already filling your pipe. Then you have the mess with being slashdotted (yeah, showing my preDigg age). Compression, done incorrectly, chews up CPU time. There are instances where it makes more sense to push out the pages as they are, rather than compress them.**

I am lucky enough to be a geek, and will be rolling out tons of autoblogs and the like in the new year. Already doing some stress testing on my dev server at home. Autoblogs will be pushed out in bunches of 100, on each VPS server. I am aiming for at least 10mb per site in RAM, which means I can pretty much cache every page in RAM. No fancy stuff on the sites so while they will have a php CMS backend, I will be serving the equivalent of static pages.

It will be interesting staying on top of all this. The people who will be truly fucked are those running tons of sites on reseller accounts on servers they have no control over.

**extreme example. Your dev server on your home machine. Viewing http://localhost uncompressed will be quicker than compressing. Extreme yes, but sometimes it is actually faster if you turn off compression.

Not an issue at all.

Even now google uses loading speed as a factor.
It is just how fast google spiders can crawl a site.

Anyway,
matt once said that they use up to 200 factors to rank a site.

And when matt was asked to list them he just gave a smile.
basically, he doesn't wanna list everythg.

coz, if he lists everythg then probably Adsense will go out of business.

clade said:

After your site is done all you need to do is run your site thru

analyze.websiteoptimization.com

It'll tell you what you need to do.

Click to expand...

Interesting.. my small niche html sites actually take a bit longer to load then my small niche wordpress sites.. not by much, just a few seconds longer. However, compared to the "larger" wordpress sites with lots of bells and whistles.. yeah, those take quite a bit longer..

If you want to load sites really fast, you should enable gzip compression on your server. It can save upto 90% of your time. Just contact your webhost provider. They might do it themselves for you.

Hope this helps,
Blackhat_Boy..

Blackhat_Boy said:

If you want to load sites really fast, you should enable gzip compression on your server. It can save upto 90% of your time. Just contact your webhost provider. They might do it themselves for you.

Hope this helps,
Blackhat_Boy..

Click to expand...

i thk most webhost providers already provide you with gzip compression.
all you have to do would be enable it via .htacess.

here is what GA Labs says about one of my sites today:

Performance overview

On average, pages in your site take 42.1 seconds to load (updated on Dec 24, 2009). This is slower than 100% of sites.

WTF? I have the slowest site on the internet? WOW got to be #1 in something


seriously the GA speed test does not seem to be accurate, looking at the graph I notice mostly under 10 sec range except couple days (above), no changes where done locally on the site. I assume main reason site gets slow is due to its nature (live video broadcasting) and peek visitor days, various scripts and couple server issues (Holland).
All my static html sites are pretty good, only WP seem to have issues.

I think converting WP php to static html could help, right?

So does it mean that heavy Wordpress themes with plugins and colorful images are going down the way ?

@spellathon : try to keep your WP plugings less than 10. And just google "how to optimize images for the web" and you will get everything you need to know about images.

Hope that helps,
Blackhat_Boy

I've been thinking this is correctly right and speed will come into play. I also agree that if you don't know what you are doing when you start tweaking you can cause more trouble than you solve.

I've got a dedicated box just because one of my sites gets a crap load of traffic at times. I recently discovered something that those of you in control of your hardware can do. Recompile your kernel with xCache as a DSO. You will see so much better performance. Also if you are running Worpdress which most of us are, then tweak your mySQL settings. Those two items will really help with performance.

I'm on the wordpress development list and there is a lot of talk of including some sort of compression into the wordpress core. Not sure what it may look like, but the Wordpress core team is also talking about how to improve the speed.

The simplest way to increase the speed of a wordpress site is to use server side caching via the wp-super-cache plugin - in this way static html is served rather than using php processing.

Yes WP Super Cache Plugin is really good as it decreases the load time considerably