Site Load times now a significant factor in Google Indexing

At WordCamp last weekend in Kilkenny, I asked the Google search representatives why a Posterous blog I maintain might be slow to be indexed by Google. Elena responded that she couldn’t comment on any individual site, but that the site load time is a significant factor in Google’s new algorithm.

In the case of the Posterous blog, it is being indexed, but is not being returned in search results for Ireland as it is hosted in the US. The load time is not an issue.

The SEO advice is always to optimise the site load time where Google ranking is critical to the site. The site load time is increased by running Flash (Adobe) visuals, and the number of Javascripts – the number of calls to the server in order to build the page. Obviously, there is a trade-off between design and making your site attractive to customer and ensuring that it loads quickly.  

For sites that run on WordPress, the WP-SuperCache Plugin (or WP-Cache Plugin), which is freely available, can be installed to allow the ‘caching’ of pages, so that the page is built and stored as a static file and served to visitors. In this way, the page is served more quickly as it does not require to build the page from the database again.

Check your own site and see if it’s unnecessarily slow. After all, Google’s bots are only put off by slowness because actual visitors are!

You can check to see how long your site takes to load by running it through Pingdom Tools. This will show you how long each part of your web page is taking to load.

Check your own site and see if it’s unnecessarily slow. After all, Google’s bots are only put off by slowness because actual visitors are!

Here’s the data from this site’s Home page:

Website information

Total loading time:    3.7 seconds

Total objects:  22 (165 KB)

External objects: 0

(X)HTML: 1 (13.9KB)

RSS/XML: 0

CSS: 2 (22KB)

Scripts: 4 (70.7KB)

Images: 15 (58.3KB)

Plugins: 0

Other: 0

Redirected: 0

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