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."

Comments

so, spammers just need servers...

[FuckingNickName]

...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.

Re:so, spammers just need servers...

[GIL_Dude]

You hit the nail on the head with that one. I, too, find myself using queries containing "site:msdn.microsoft.com (rest of search)" (for say Windows API information) or using "-" in the searches to suppress certain results. Like you say, otherwise you get basically "a bunch of crap" - mainly from people who have no idea what they are doing. Just today I had a problem with elbyvcdshell.dll (from Slysoft's Virtual Clone Drive) causing Windows Explorer to hang for 5 minutes each time I renamed a folder. I tried searching that on Google - hell half of the hits were stupid posts of every file on a system at malware check sites, or bleepingcomputer.com, or other "is this malware" posts. Did I say half? Shoot - I just checked again and I think I meant 85%. The results for most tech searches are indeed useless unless you already know what site you want and include that information in your search. The internet is just filled with crap sites that make it into the indexes and get high relevance.

That sounds reasonable.... so far

[erroneus]

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.

Re:Slashdot

[FireFury03]

If a server can't handle much load, it's probably not that important

Or it is a very informative hobbyist site with lots of useful info on it, which is comparatively slow compared to a well funded commercial site that has nothing but marketing-speak.

TFA says they are looking at "server response times", but I can't see this being at all useful unless they look at the total page load time (including all the ads that come off slow servers).

Slashdotting, power failure, tsumani, cleaning lady tripping over the network cables, poor server-side scripting, badly configured web server... What's the difference anyway?

The difference is that some of these problems are transitory and some are more permanent. You probably don't want transitory problems to affect the ranking (here's hoping they average it over several crawls).

Re:Slashdot

[DNS-and-BIND]

So, a guy with a 8Gb per month website is now required to have a server with root access and his own copy of apache, which he will then tune like a whistle without even having to read the documentation? Come on, man. Shared host. Non-expert admin that doesn't even like to mess with his Drupal install now that it's working, for fear of breaking it in some subtle yet damaging way. But thanks for shitting all over a novice with that nasty tone, though.