• SEO-Blog
  • Startseite
  • RSS-Feed, complete Feed
  • About the Blog, Blogcharts
  • Archive: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
• Weitere Postings
  • Percentage of PDF-files within the Google-SERPs
  • Does Google favor Keyword-domains?
  • Keyword-Domains: one-word or hyphenated?
  • PageRank-Update 10/2009
  • IndexWatch 10/2009
  • SEO.at: SEO-News for the Jilted Generation
  • Twitter: growth
  • Twitter: usage
  • Twitter: International Usage
  • Google Chrome OS
•  

What is the impact of the webserver-speed?

One subject that comes up in regular intervals, for which I was unable to find an explanation that sums it all up, is the possible impact that the webserver-speed has on searchengines. So here are my own experiences with this matter.

First there is the understandable impact it has on Google's crawling-behavior: if the web-server's answer takes too long, Google will think that there are traffic-problems and will therefore cut back on the frequency of its crawling, so as to not make those problems any worse. Though this would, by implication, also mean, that this domain would not be crawled as often and as thoroughly as it “deserves” to be. This can become a problem, especially for vast domains or websites that serve up current informations, seeing how being crawled naturally come before being indexed.

On the other hand, we have the much more complex effect on the ranking. To find a possible connection, I measured the speed of about 100.000 URLs and compared the response time against the respective ranking in the following diagram:


We have to keep in mind that, with more than 200 possible ranking-factors, it is not that easy to differentiate between cause and effect. Especially strong domains like wikipedia.org can have a strong influence on these evaluations – though if we redraw the same diagram without the 10.000 strongest domains, we will get a similar picture.

Now, I could imagine that the response-time really is one of Google's two hundred ranking-signals, but it could also be that the webserver-speed has an implicit effect on the ranking through the user's
behavior (retention time on website, clicks back to the SERPs, etc.). Regardless of which explanation you might prefer, I would advise you to take a critical look at the response-time of your own web-server and possibly make improvements if necessary. In nearly all cases, it should be possible to send out a site thats purely HTML in about half a second.