Slashdot Mirror
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."
One would think only if the Google Bot happens to be indexing your site at that exact moment; one would additionally think they'll revisit to see if it's structural or not?
If you use Google Webmaster Central you may notice that, while Google's algorithm is smart, it's also very overestimated in some areas, and involves plenty of manual tweaking by the Google employees for it to work properly.
Site Speed is not calculated solely from the times the Google bot takes to crawl the page, it's calculated from Google toolbars that have the pagerank feature enabled (that feature calls home which sites you visit, and how fast the page got loaded).
Whether Google can detect clusters of frequent accesses such as from "slashdotting" is entirely under question, since most slashdot users may not have google toolbar with pagerank on, but for the *few* users that do, the site will just appear slow in general.
Additionally, if a site targets a demographic that has worse latency (low income people, areas with dial-up and so on), then, again, that site will appear to be slower, while actually the visitors have slower internet in general.
Additionally yet, often the reason a site is slow is somewhere along the route, nowhere close to either the visitor ISP, not the site server, and it's not for all users either. So if you have bad luck or due to your content you pick up users that happen to often be routed through the bad route, you'll lose page rank.
Does this serve as an indirect or otherwise passive-aggressive push for network neutrality? I suspect it might be.
It sounds to me like a push completely against net-neutrality. The websites that are served up faster get a higher rank. The websites that are throttled get a lower rank. Net neutrality isn't about how website owners filter their bandwidth for their visitors; they've always been free to do what they want. Net neutrality is about the ISPs and other backbone entities of the internet throttling traffic. If there was an ISP between google and two webpages it could direcly influence their ranks by throttling the site it wants knocked down and prioritizing the site it wants to give a higher rank to.
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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.
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