Google turns site speed into ranking-factor

Johannes Beus
Now it is official: Google a pages' site-speed into its algorithm. In the future, the time a page needs to load up will be part of the about 200 ranking-factors that Google uses to compute the results. Right now, this is supposed to only be happening for the Google.com domain and less than one percent of the SERPs should change due to this – though we can be pretty sure that Google will roll out this factor globally in due time, which will then also be an issue for the German SERPs.

At the moment, “page speed” combines two different measurements. On the one hand, you have the time it takes to load the HTML-part of a page – this means the time it takes to Googlebot to request the page until the very last byte has been transferred. You can find this value in the Google-Webmaster-Tools under the Diagnostic+Crawling-statistics tab:


A decent value for this should be anything less than 500 milliseconds. Values that are on average above that, might keep Google from crawling the site as deeply or full-scale as it was planning on. The second measurement – which is the one that will be part of the algorithm in the future – is the amount of time it takes for the whole page to load: including pictures, JavaScript and AdServer-inclusions. This value can too be checked in through Webmaster-Tools, this time at Google Labs+website-performance:


Google indicated that 1,5 seconds is the threshold between “good” and “bad”. Additionally, the page also holds a number of tips on how to improve the load time. These measurements are taken through the Google Toolbar, so on the whole, they should be correct.
Johannes Beus - on Fri (04/09/2010) at 22:08 PM

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