
Using site speed in web search ranking - mattyb
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
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karipatila
The funny thing is that as Analytics isn't gzipped nor local, it's usually a
major contributor the the overall load time.

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froggy
There's an asynchronous GA script available:

[http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncTra...](http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncTracking.html)

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euroclydon
I hope the Google bot doesn't come along and measure my site's speed by
hitting one page when cache is empty.

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spokey
If the Webmaster Tools site performance chart is any indication, that's
exactly what they'll do. Let's just hope they'll ensure a large enough sample
before using this as a factor in search ranking.

In my experience the Webmaster Tools performance indicator is terribly
inaccurate for small sample sizes (relatively unpopular sites).

For one site I have intimate details of, Googlebot visits roughly one page
every three minutes. I have every indication (knowledge of what the site is
doing, local and distributed load testing, analysis of server logs, etc.) that
the site performs consistently and well, but the Site Performance chart on
Google's Webmaster Tools is all over the place: anywhere from 0.4 seconds to
load (99th percentile) (which is where it happens to be now and is probably
slightly overestimating the site performance) to more than 9 seconds to load,
oscillating pretty wildly. I'm fairly confident this isn't accurate (unless
GA, the only external component on the site, is itself to blame).

On other, more heavily trafficked sites the Web Performance chart seems much
closer to reality--in line with our load test results and anecdotal
experience, so whatever the issue is it seems to pan out when they take a
large enough sample size.

Edit: I see in other comments here that Google is using end-user data from the
Toolbar to track this. That's helpful information and may explain the
variability I and apparently others have seen. Again, this is a good reason to
hope they'll only take this into account for large sample sizes. Otherwise,
hope that your customers aren't using dialup connections.

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compumike
This post encouraged me to take a look at Google Webmaster Tools -> Labs ->
Site Performance for my site. It says 4.3 seconds average load time, "slower
than 63% of all sites", and the graph since November shows tremendous
variability, varying between 2-6 seconds. I don't understand where 4.3 seconds
comes from (even with an empty cache, it's maybe 1.6 seconds to onLoad),
unless they're using some old ISDN line or something. And I don't know where
the variability over time is coming from, with a lightly loaded server that
hasn't changed much in that time.

Is anyone else having similar weirdness with their Site Performance graphs?

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noss
Do you have a lot of visitors? I have my webmaster tools interface in Swedish,
but it is telling me that my 1,5 sec (faster than 84% of all sites) average is
of low accuracy ("låg tillförlitlighet") and has less than 100 data points.

The worst offenders to the speed of my site is that I have both google adsense
and google analytics on it. I find it ironic.

From what I understand the time is sampled from visitors, and includes the
time from the page request until the page is fully rendered.

I'd love to know what people do that get their times well below sub-second.

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compumike
Ah, I see now... I didn't realize that this was end-user data via Google
Toolbar opt-in. I've got "medium accuracy" 100-1000 data points, and I'm
assuming that means total over the full 5 months. In that case, it doesn't
surprise me that some combinations of visitors and connections might have long
load times. But yes, the fact that non-visible elements seem to make a
difference is not great.

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chaosmachine
_"Fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our
implementation"_

It's pretty clear they're just using this to weed out broken sites that take
forever to load. If your visitors aren't already bouncing because of long load
times, you probably have nothing to worry about.

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bryanh
I don't know why you're being downvoted. While I think the article suggests
that they are giving a slight boost to sites that give a better user
experience, I think your point is a much more likely reality.

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est
what happens if my site is targeted in one country only, and the speed from
rest of country is slow?

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keltex
I was tempted to upvote this one just because it wasn't about the changes to
the iPhone SDK agreement.

