Matt Cutts’ blogpost about Google introducing site speed as an influencing factor in how it ranks pages has got me thinking about making some changes to a few of my sites.
At first I was quite disenfranchised with this idea on a number of points.
My main objection is that this seems to work in the favor of big players who can bankroll faster servers, faster connections and co-location. This isn’t something I feel benefits Google’s end users, nor is it the kind of possibility for abuse that they have traditionally allowed.
Secondly, I don’t believe that speed is a key factor that users expect their search results to be filtered by. When I run a search on Google, I expect to find the most relevant answers listed first – I am either looking for a specific piece of information, the answer to a question, to find a site, or maybe I’m looking for a specific bit of media, etc… I am not looking for the fastest site, the best designed site, or even the best organised site, I’m just looking for the right site.
Thirdly, this directly penalises sites who are non-commercial, those hosted in developing nations, or ultimately sites that might be directly relevant but who just aren’t fast loading. That doesn’t make any sense to me.
Now with a little further thinking, my perspective on this has changed a little. Matt’s post did say that this doesn’t affect more than 1% of sites indexed in Google (though that probably means it does affect millions) – so the impact is relatively minimal. Speed, like it or not, is also an important factor in user experience, and it does have an impact on the end user’s ability to get hold of the information they’re looking for.
But most importantly, when you really think about it the people who are in the best position to benefit from this change are probably not big corporate players – its those of us who run small, agile sites and blogs who can quickly zip through them and optimise code a bit better, improve image compression, and those of us who don’t rely on ads for revenue generation (woop!). Ironically, its Google AdSense that often makes pages drag in their load time, and frankly I’m quite happy that I might get a better SERP position because my site will load a hundred times faster than one that’s bringing in five Flash based tower ads or something ugly like that.
It’s also worth considering that the mobile web is really blowing up right now, and speed efficiencies on your site are going to make it a lot more accessible for those browsing on an iPhone, a Blackberry, or another mobile device. 3G services are pretty slow compared to a landline broadband connection, so don’t fall too easily into the trap of not optimising for speed as best possible because it does probably matter more to users now than any time since the demise of the 56.6kbps modem.
