The enigmatic Google algorithms are now officially looking at a new ingredient – ‘site speed’. Google officially announced on Friday that they’ve embedded ‘site speed’ as a new component in their search ranking algorithms. In December, with another blog post Google hinted that such a change is getting set to launch. Now it is official!
Google Makes It More About Speed
“Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests"
In a Webmaster Central Blog post jointly posted by the top brasses of the Google 'Search Quality Team', Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts stated that “You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed.”
Along with this, Google also warned website owners not to take too much action to improve speed at the expense of other ranking factors. The speed change was implemented a week ago by Google and they’re using a plethora of elements to ensure how much faster one Web page responds over another.
In general, Google is offering the philosophy of ‘faster is better’ is not just applicable to website owners, but to the search quest of billions of internet users who wants pages to load quickly. Now with the increased demand and relevance of real-time information this ‘speed factor’ gains added advantage. The Internet is a place where everything happens in seconds. Those seconds determine many quality metrics of your site such as bounce rate, conversions, clicks, page visits and much more. So beware site owners who have created sites employing too slow loading flashy elements to broaden aesthetic appeal of your site.
Google also listed a wide variety of tools for measuring the speed of site which includes tools from Google, Yahoo, and other third-party developers. You can view those speed test tools here.
The 'Search Engine Land' blog post validly pointed that Google’s infamous algorithm employs 200 different ranking factors in determining the rank of a search result. To learn even more about it check out this good read.
"Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs" – source from googlewebmastercentral.
Now web technologies have advanced in so that even dynamic sites can be loaded in a static way using cache, xml etc. So load speed is not a concern for those who build sites other than flash.
I think this could pave way for faster, lighter websites which would be access in a flash of a second. Does this also mean its an end of the road for Flashy websites? Could also have websites that have a niche – such as online games and interactive websites – change their strategy? Good to have some thinking done.
Google has added the site speed factor to only approximately 1 percent of the search queries performed today. So I guess with this new addition there won't be any visible shift in rankings of sites. Thats why Google warned website owners that speed is not the ultimate entity in itself. But this new algo factor would affect E-commerce sites substantially as they're having multitude of analytics and usability feature scripts that can cause slow response times.
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