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Google Incorporates Site Speed Into PageRank Calculation
lee1 writes "Google is now taking into account how fast a page loads in calculating its PageRank. In their own words: '[W]e're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. ... our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. ... While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.' Considering the increasing dilution of high-ranking results by endless series of plagiarizing 'blogs,' brainless forums, and outright scam sites, anything that further reduces the influence of the quality of the content is something I would rather not have. Not that Google asked me."
Nice
Not that Google asked me.
Well, now they know that you're an influential Slashdot contributor I'm sure they'll sit up and take notice.
So when a site gets slashdotted and blown to oblivion, Google also ranks it lower. Awesome!
If site A and site B have the same info, then how about weighing which one has the info spread over 10 pages with 3-4 different adservers spewing flash and gifs and all sorts of javascript trickery and which one doesn't (or has less at least)?
I suppose an obvious question to ask then is: from where is Google measuring site speed? From a single particular server/location (presumably in the US)? From the 'nearest Google datacentre/server farm' to the site (and if so, how do they determine this)?
If they are measuring site speed from a single (US) location, that's gotta be hurting the page rankings for any sites hosted outside the US, as even if those pages are lightning fast locally, you're always going to have that ~100 ms latency to Europe / ~150 ms to Asia / ~200 ms to NZ & Australia etc, from the US.
In their own words: '[W]e're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. ... our users place a lot of value in speed -- that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.
Search speed is almost 100% subjective. Heck...are the tools Google is using to evaluate speed openly known to all that matter in this?
I predict trouble ahead.
especially the corporate run sites have become loaded with shit. flash, javascript ads, javascript code that tries to get all kinds of info from me in order to deliver it to the advertisers, banner ads, includes from numerous other sites, their javascript, this that, a lot of loaded shit. some can even clog your browser if they chance up in a particular moment.
it will be good. now they will need to weigh speed factor. i shouldnt have to wait for a damn 3rd party ad provider's clogged servers to view the actual page im visiting.
Read radical news here
...close to and prioritising Google. Gotcha.
Really, am I the only one to find Google a fairly poor *find* engine? I mean, for anything which might remotely come close to sounding like it's a product, you've got Wikipedia right at the top, followed by 1000 review/comparison/pricing sites. For a tech question, you have expert-sexchange and 1000 crappy forums with responses from the downright wrong to the gratuitously abusive. I barely use Google (or any search engine much) for their generic WWW search - I'm more likely to be +site: searching a specific newsgroup/support forum/journal/enthusiast site I already know has intelligence. I don't need Google using yet another algorithm to fail at finding useful information - just employ 100 people spending 8 hours a day tagging the clone/spam/pricecheck/etc sites if you actually want to make a difference.
Obviously needs to be refined, but in principle it's not as bad as it looks. There are a lots of queries when you'd rather have a big company's site in the first page of results, rather than an obscure blog or scam site. Discovering how much they wish to pay for bandwidth is a good method to tell them apart.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Yay! I can DDoS my competitors and have Google endorse it!
There may be no "I" in team, but there's also no "F" in way.
So, now well-connected sites run by media companies will have more relevance in Search results vs. minority opinions put out on a cheap web host?
'Do no evil' is meaningless if you don't actually examine what you are doing.
This is clearly an effort to give precedence to commercial enterprises and advertisers. Take a link farm. Nothing really there, so it does not require much power to serve pages. Pages will load quickly, and, coincidently, generate revenue for Google. For legitimate businesses, those that can afford network optimizations are exactly those that will also pay for ads. OTOH, web sites that provide useful services but are slow are going to, eventually, be left in the dust. More link farms, fewer useful services, a lamer google. Too bad MS can't put together a legitimate search engine.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Does this help do battle against spam/scam sites? Yes.
Does this help hosts of original content? Maybe... maybe not.
Does this serve as an indirect or otherwise passive-aggressive push for network neutrality? I suspect it might be.
After all, those seeking to act against Google's interests by lowering speed and throughput to and from Google would automatically get a lower rank. Think about some of the newspapers out there who can't get over their aging business model. Think about other sources of information who might also be a competitor of Google in other markets? At the moment, Google is the primary source for lots of people.
I must admit, I am having some difficulty coming up with arguments against this idea but I can't help but get a slightly uneasy feeling about this just the same.
I supposed net neutrality only applies when you're serving the derivitive work of newspapers, blogs and television companies - and not when you're scraping it.
"our users place a lot of value in speed"
is not my opinion in the least, personally I like quality over speed.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
this seems like an indirect push AGAINST net neutrality, not for it.
although the strict definition of net neutrality doesn't apply the essence of it is the same. the one that can afford greater bandwidth has a louder voice.
From a slightly older article on the same blog:
So this isn't quite as susceptible to people playing games with Googlebot as it might appear.
If another site pretends to be me or tries to sell products that sound like my product, and have more money than me to spend on servers, and are closer to Google, Google will redirect people to them instead of me. Bad move.
Oh boy, all the more reason for ISPs to tier bandwidth! I can see the gleam in the marketing department's eyes now: pay us extra or your traffic will be a bit slower AND you won't show up in search rankings.
PageRank is a specific calculation that just looks at incoming links to a site. This change has to do with how a site is ranked by the search engine, and has nothing to do with the PageRank part of the algo.
I think this is just a result of the net neutrality ruling. As ISPs start to choke the bandwidth of people that do not pay for premium access they will drop in the Google rankings.
I occasionally put websites together for small businesses and it seems increasingly hard to get these kinds of websites known. Google seems to be more and more indexing websites with lots of content and now with speedier response which will completely slant their rankings towards large companies with huge resources.
For example, I did a website for a lady that sells garden and landscaping lighting local to where I am from. Her business focus is not one that needs a large web page, she just wants her catalog to display basically but she does want people to find her with Google. I've done all the things like making sure the title is accurate and headers are relevant, etc. However, it seems to me that much of it is futile. Unless she is the type of business that focuses on inviting people to add content to her site (in other words an internet/web business) the sad truth is that she will basically get ignored by Google.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
First time my website has ever moved up in pagerank!! Lazy HTML FTW!!
Qxe4
I'm not sure how many of my readers have Google toolbar installed. Guess I can install it myself and visit my site for Google to get the page load speed data...
Where does TFA mention this is incorporated in PageRank (a very specific algorithm)?
Google use hundreds of algorithms to determine the ranking of pages in result lists and my understanding, from talks Google staff have given, is that PageRank is used in only a tiny fraction of queries.
> anything that further reduces the influence of the quality of the content is something I would rather not have.
See title. If someone has something insightful to say, usually said someone can say it in simple terms (because that is a virtue of powerful minds).
Simple terms, simple web marking... you where I'm going.
I can't stand slowness. So, for one, I think faster is great.
> Not that Google asked me.
Apparently, Google was seen drinking a coffee with Apple. Apparently, they asked Apple something. Apparently, or possibly, they thought someone was behind Adobe's increased speed in Widow$. Apparently, they think M$ is doing whatever it wants. Apparently, they decided to put a stop to that, since the DOJ was ineffective.
I applaud this move with a standing ovation (though I don't endorse Jobs' ways -- I liked Woz best).
How long until I have to pay my webhost not to sandbag these measurements? Yippee...
Next we will see support for "copied and pasted" text, where the main content of one site is the same as another. I can imagine now in my results "likelihood of matching text as previous result: x%". This should help work out which pages are simply copied and pasted blogs, news or press releases.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Google must be stopped! Is taking advantage of its monopoly to... to... well, do good. At least from their point of view. Some sites are badly coded, not even try to be optimized, and speeding them up probably won't require a big investment, while will improve the experience for the visitors.
But in the other hand, some sites by goals, general idea, location or popularity end being slow from google's point of view and gets punished, potentially being the authoritative in some topic. Could be mitigated a bit if the "speed" they are measuring is the kind of metric and recommendations that do page speed, yslow and some of their other suggested tools do, that in most part arent about how fast your server side scripts run or how much bandwidth your server have, but usually cheap to follow directives like compressing output, optimizing images or where you include your javascripts/css in the html.
In other words, they're compelling webmasters to optimize their sites to respond more quickly to Google's spider, in order to improve their rankings.
Google Site Speed is how well you have kept to the protocol specs to make
sure the size of your website is as small as possible so as it travels through the
pipes, it does so as efficiently as possible. It is NOT a rank of how fast your
host provider delivers to the end user.
Badly implemented pages will get a lower rank. (...and so they should IMHO)
Google is trying to make sure everyone makes clean websites.
I am sure Google also benefits by saving power/processing costs if the amount of
kilobytes to parse/store per web page is smaller.
Recently there used to be a feature to "ban" a result (like experts exchange) but they removed it in favor of only being able to "star" results you like. I'll have to say this seemed the single best feature they had ever added to search results. It was very useful to be able to identify (for myself) who was gaming the results. But apparently google thinks I'm better off with the safety of little pretty stars.
meep
They've found a backdoor around it: either you pay for the new, expedited, luxury internet, or you and the other slow sites can molder on page 41 of a Google search.
Futurist Traditionalism
Google's been getting more loose in its interpretation of query strings in an effort to provide better search results. For example, now they routinely return matches with a different form of the same verb as your query.
One kind of looseness that bit me in the ass recently was when I was doing a search for something like "X puerto rico" (I forget what the X was). Google somehow decided that since the postal 2-letter code for Puerto Rico is "PR," pages with the terms "X" and "PR" hit. But of course "PR" is also short for "public relations," leading to a mass of completely irrelevant hits.
Are you adequate?
So those of us who host our own web servers from our DSL lines will be in that one percent.
Thanks Google. You really f* up my Day.
It took me a while to have my site at #1 based on the regional relevance of its content.
Now I might have to get dedicated hosting, just so that customers who would have previously
found my page right away won't go to the the other website which is out of their range but
has been around for 5 years longer than mine.
Does Google's measurement include delays from off-site ad servers? That's a big issue. For many sites (including Slashdot), the off-site ad servers are the big bottleneck.
Web site programmers will now have to avoid ad code that delays page loading until the ads come in. I expect to see ad code that measures the response time of the ad server, and if the ad server doesn't respond fast enough, drops the ad and reports the fail to a monitoring site.
Then we'll see sites gaming the system. If Google is using information from their "Google Toolbar" to affect search results, we'll probably see attempts to pump fake data into the Google Toolbar server. Google is going to have to learn the lesson well known to developers of networked games - "never trust the client".
Already posted, but thanks. That's the answer I was looking for. It makes much more sense now.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
Since Google is both a purveyor of ads and analytics, suppose that the new metric deliberately ignores Google's ads. In that case, this will cause a bias against competing ad networks (because it's algorithmically impossible to decide if an arbitrary piece of code is advertising or not).
(*) The first time a page is loaded, the images are not yet cached. But a proper load time measurement should always be repeated several times to reduce the inherent statistical noise, and then the caching helps amortize the image loads (as does image reuse on related pages). Of course, a spider might not care about loading images, but in that case, the correlation with the average user experience won't be strong.
Funny, 'cause whenever I have a site loading slowly, I usually can look at the address bar and see it stuck on Google Analytics. Well, until I blocked it and greatly sped up the web, that is.
You can see speed results at Google Webmaster Tools. They do include all external media (which as someone who runs a discussion site that has hotlinked images is very frustrating).
Still it reports our pages average 0.9s to load, and even still that's apparently faster than 94% of sites.
I have a simple commercial site that uses Google maps but is otherwise trivial. Using Google webmaster tools tells me my average page load time is 19.5 seconds and slower than 99% of sites. Guess how happy I'm going to be using Google maps if it causes my Google page rank to fall?
Personally I see much faster load times with a 1.5Mbps link. To get to 19.5 seconds implies the timings are coming from robots or customers with slow links or computers.
http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=Torry-Ann+Hansen&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
These must be very fast sites!
... host your stuff at Google and get the PageRank boost. But that would be evil, no?
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
some time ago I found GMBMG, google the way it used to be, and when I find search results are uselessly bloated with crap, then I turn to this... http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/
A significant fraction of page rendering time is due to Google AdSense pulling in its data. Will we be penalized by Google for that?
Unless a business is trying to serve the entire country, where they come in general topic searches does not matter that much. From a user's perspective, a broad general search IS best served by the largest and fastest sites.
For small local businesses, you've got to tune for the locality, which includes a whole 'nother set of Google tools on top of the standard SEO stuff like title, content, meta tags, etc. http://www.google.com/local/add/
She would also be well-served by using online tech to develop repeat customers in other ways, like an e-mail newsletter, or engaging on sites like Yelp.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Half the people I heard from said that if they scroll all the way to the bottom they can read the answers for free, and the other half say this doesn't work. This confused me for the longest time until I finally figured out the answer.
Expertsexchange allows you to scroll down to the bottom to get a free answer the first time you visit their page, then gives your browser a cookie saying that you have gotten your free answer, and won't show you any more. So if you want to ensure that you can always scroll to the bottom, you simply have to block cookies from them and you are good to go.
A much easier (and faster too!) way to see the answer for free every time is to simply click the Google's "Cached" link and then scroll to the bottom.
No need to mess with blocking of cookies or any other crap.
Works every time.
"Fish" (David B. Trout)