If you dabble in a bit of search engine optimisation, Google's latest tool may make you rethink a thing or two, as the online giant has confirmed that it is calculating the speed of site responses as part of its search ranking criteria.
After making an initial announcement at the end of last year, Google has said that it is now detecting the speed at which a site responds to web requests.
“Here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web,” wrote Google Fellow Amit Singhal and principal engineer of Google Search quality team Matt Cutts in a blog post.
"As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests."
The move comes as a result of Google's homework, which has shown that when a site responds slowly, visitors tend not to hang around for too long.
The blog post further claims that, "faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs."
However, before you go around redesigning your website, Google maintains that the speed signal won't carry as much weight as a page’s relevance and has noted that less than 1 per cent of search queries have been affected by the change.
The move has received a range of positive comments, although some feedback has been concerned as to how Google is implementing its new tool.
One blog comment raised some webmaster concerns, "You guys hopefully look at the connection speeds and origins of visitors as well. A website with lots of Indian users for instance will likely have slower speeds reported than a website with Japanese or Swedish users. Are those factors included in the calculation?"
While Google says it is using a variety of sources to determine site speed, it still remains unclear as to how Google is measuring site speed exactly.
In an effort at being helpful, Google did mention some tools you can use to evaluate your site speed:
"¢ Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
"¢ YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
"¢ WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimisation checklist.
Will you be checking your site's speedometer? Leave us a comment and let us know.
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