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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."
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)?
...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.
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.
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.
The main site serves visitors from the US. Thus, measuring speeds from multiple locations around the US is probably the best thing to do. They're presumably measuring speed from all their datacenters (their crawlers are likely to be distributed across the country (and world), so recording the average speed over multiple crawls would be a good approximation when you're dealing with the scale of Google and the Web).
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
tl;dr
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.
Mod parent up! Google is catching on to something us slashdotters have known for a long time. The person who posts fastest usually has the most insightful things to say!
I have an idea: Slashdot could easily incorporate average commenting speed into its UserRank and serve pages to excessively-first poster slowly, giving chance to other, more insightful readers, such as the humble me.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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.
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.
Good thing the quality of content is still king. However if you have two sites that rank at 100% and one is significantly faster then it comes up first. I can't see how that is bad thing.
Google says this affects a tiny fraction of sites and let's face it, it will be irrelevant when comparing two text only sites. But with the growing web app trend then yes speed does make a difference. If you want to use an online Office replacement, like offline software, you don't want to sit there waiting for things to happen. Online games, like offline, can succeed or fail based on their speed.
The guys at Google aren't dumb. I doubt we'll see pages punished for loading in 100 ms rather than 50ms. However if you take 2 minutes compared to 50 ms then you may be if your content isn't the best and quite frankly I'm happy with that.
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
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".
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.
... 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)
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.