Do Your Site’s Pages Load Fast?

Google announced what they call “Site Speed” (everything has to have a catchy marketing tag) which is a measure of how fast your web pages load. While most websites load at about the same speed, some pages such as dynamically generated ecommerce content, web 2.0 content, and long blog pages can load slowly. Most sites don’t have to be concerned that their page loading times will affect their rankings, however those with lots of slow loading scripts (add in content) could be in for a shock.

It’s hard to say what Google’s reasoning is adopting Site Speed. Most slow loading content isn’t spiderable anyway, and as long as Googlebot picks up the main text portion of the page, it should move on. It could be that Googlebot is having trouble spidering quickly. Google recently tried to respond to real time indexing by adopting the new Google file system which allows them to spider faster and collect more information. By collecting more, these slow loading pages can present a problem. They have to spider, so they’ve done some Public relations to encourage webmasters to clean up their coding. Web 2.0 coding is very distributed with content coming from all sorts of other sources. That can slow things down. If you read some forums, you’ll see many people blaming Google’s adsense scripts for much of the slow load times. Their solution – get rid of Adsense. I don’t Google considers Adsense a factor in slow load times, but really it is the predominant form of web advertising on millions of sites.

With respect to SEO, it’s important to consider how clean your web design is, how much content you’re putting in each page, and whether your web servers are too busy to give Googlebot the material it is asking for. If you’re hosting with a company that has tens of thousands of sites on the same server and IP address, it could mean Google thinks your Site Speed is poor. Better review your hosting quality.

In this presentation, Matt Cutts, Google lead search engineer describes the need for Site Speed:

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