Google Rankings & Website Loading Speed

As reported earlier here Google has been pushing the need for speed on the web for some time now - since November, 2009 in fact. They were emphatic that their mission was to ''speed up the Web''. The recent but unheralded release of their new search algorithm Caffeine, makes this a real issue for website owners with slow loading websites. Already some slow websites have suffered a drop in rankings since Caffeine has been rolled out (now estimated to be across 80% of Google's databases).

Many articles have been written about how speed will effect search engine optimisation. We, at Zeald.com, have been pushing the case for faster websites since we started doing our website seminars, five years ago. Now plenty of other commentators are joining us in stressing how important it is to have a fast loading website.

There is now a contention that the faster and smaller a page is, the better it will be trawled by Google web crawlers (spiders/robots). The theory is that as large as Google is, the web is infinitely bigger - and getting bigger by the millisecond. The Google spiders/robots can only handle so much data at any given time. The amount of data that their spiders can handle is mind-boggling but still not unlimited. Google knows which sites are really popular and will refresh their index of those sites more often. This is why big sites like Amazon can change and be indexed in Google almost instantly but smaller sites may have to wait hours, days or even weeks to get indexed.

In terms of SEO, getting pages indexed is half the battle, especially on large sites. There is a current theory that if Google only allocates so much CPU time to a website, then short, fast pages are the way to go. If your server is slow and you have lengthy pages, instead of crawling 30 pages, the Google spider may only have time to look at 15 pages because they took so much longer to download and look at.

Some SEO experts have already started improving page loading speeds using a variety of tools.
They have already noticed a large increase in pages indexed in correlation with the speed of the page download. There was found to be a distinct correlation between page speed, and the number of pages crawled per day.

Time to check your website pages loading speed for your high priority pages and consider reducing the size of those pages.