Site Speed - An important algorithm factor for Google Adwords and Soon SEO

Posted by: gmessenger

Over the last few years I have seen the Google Adwords service evolve utilising many search engine optimisation factors as part of its Google Adwords quality score calculation.

But this time around one of the newer factors within the Google Adwords quality score calculation, page load time, is likely to become an SEO ranking factor sometime during 2010.

Matt Cutts from Google all but confirmed this is an interview at the PubCon conference in Las Vegas last week. Matt described this as one of his 'what to expect in 2010'.

So it really is time for website owners to start taking the speed of their websites seriously.

Certainly those marketers managing Adwords campaigns for Flash based websites or generally slow sites would have seen instances of campaigns almost suspended or quality scores dropping out to due to poor page load times during this year – Page load time is a determining factor in landing page Quality Score.

The Google help centre confirms how load time quality score is calculated for Adwords:

"Each of your keywords will receive a load time grade based on the average load time of the landing pages in the ad group and of any landing pages in the rest of the account with the same domain. If multiple ad groups have landing pages with the same domain, the keywords in all these ad groups will have identical load time grades."

And

"If your ad group contains landing pages with different domains, the keywords' load time grades will be based on the domain with the slowest load time. All the keywords in an ad group will always have the same load time grade."

And

"We evaluate your load time relative to the average in your server's geographic region…"

When optimising Pay Per Click search engine marketing campaigns you could work around some of these issues by choosing the fastest pages on your website as the landing pages. I would assume that Google would use a similar set of calculations and rules for the SEO site speed calculation and average the speed across a range of searches and across your site pages.

This means for SEO you need to address the entire website, you can not get around it by only fixing a few pages.

It is also worth remembering page load time is only one factor in over 200 within the algorithm, so it also depends on how much weight Google decide to allocate this factor.

However it is done, it is time to start concentrating on site speed, it makes sense from a usability perspective, people will not wait long for anything these days.

Some of the common reasons for slow sites are:

Hosting environment issues or cheap overcrowded hosting

Heavy use of Flash, Ajax and other web 3.0 technology

Slow external site references (scripts) or too many scripts running on a page or scripts set to load in the wrong order

Large graphic image files (remember you can optimise images for the web)

I think one of the most common issues for site speed would have to be the use of Flash to build the website. I see Flash used commonly amongst many of the big brands and certainly when sites are attempting to provide an interactive experience.

If you need to build your entire website in Flash, be smart about it and break your Flash website into separate files for each section or page and use feeds such as XML to populate the content. This makes the pages quicker to load and is a sound optimisation technique when considering Flash website SEO.

The good news is there are many free tools available on the web to help you measure and fix your site speed.

I have listed some of these tools below, I am sure you will find many more, so go forth and make the web faster, Google commands you (and remember they Do No Evil).

Google – Lets make the web faster - including the page speed tool - Great work from Google themselves in supporting webmasters through this change.

The Pingdom “Full Page Test” - loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScript, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It then copies the way a page is loaded in a web browser, reporting on total loading time and the number of objects on the page.

Webpagetest.org - offers the ability to choose test location (US, UK and NZ), Browser (IE7 or IE8), and more advanced settings such as repeat testing for more reliable data. The test is useful with an optimisation check list and waterfall report, similar to Pingdom’s tools.

Google’s Webmaster tools – though quite basic, the crawl stats section can give you a directional feel for the overall performance of your website.

Firebug for Firefox – a great little add on within the browser which displays the load times for all the elements being loaded on your page.

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