Test Your Page Load Time Before Google Tests it For You
So Google confirmed page load time will be a factor in the quality score and it is just a matter of time for this to be implemented. In fact, the Inside AdWords blog posted an official announcement about it last night.
Search Engine Watch Forums moderator, abbottsys, doesn't want to wait for Google to test his page's load time, instead, he is taking action now. He posted a nifty tool to test a page load time. The tool is at Pingdom.com and is pretty nifty.
Here is a graph of the load time for my article above:
My total load time is 1.9 seconds, what is really slowing me down is the Google Custom Search Engine which took the longest time to load.
So test out your landing pages before Google does. Yes, you will have several weeks of Google testing them out for you, but if you are in a rush, why wait? Plus, who cares what Google finds to be slow now, it is more about closing your deal.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.
Update: SEO Consultants has a great tool as well, check it out at http://valet.seoconsultants.com/.
rustybrick in Google AdWords at March 7, 2008 8:06 AM
Comments (5)
Comments
Finally! After all the years of emphasising how important it is for your pages to be small and load quickly, google is finally allocating value to this aspect of a website.
We operate in South Africa, and our internet service is one of the slowest in the world. Because of this we've made a concerted effort to
make our websites load as fast as possible. It is awesome to hear that we'll be rewarded for our efforts now!
The bottom line is that search engine algorithms strive to emulate human response, and a slow loading page is likely to make a user lose interest and go look for information / services somewhere else.
Posted by SEO Jacques at March 8, 2008 00:37