Do your pages load fast? Faster loading pages are loved by Google!

Does Google place any special value on SEO when organic webpage’s are faster loading? Do faster loading sites receive any SERP benefits over a website that repeatedly times out or loads incredibly slower – at a snail’s pace?

Recent evidence indicates that faster downloading pages, due to quicker server or better page optimization has measurable SEO benefits that increase your site’s organic rank.

Indications are that heavily laden, slow loading graphic pages and slow server times can harm your visitor’s experience and result in long download times which cause visitors to leave the page prematurely or to bounce back, plus if the page loads too slow when the search engine bots visit, it will likely not get indexed.

Bounce back or bounce rate data is what has been receiving the majority of the attention and may be the cause of lower rankings, signalling a poor quality page. You will find these measures in affect, currently, at Google Adwords. Here, site and page loading times are already a factor in assessing and determining Adwords Advertising page scores – started in March of 2008.

Therefore, it is not surprising that Google’s organic search is now applying the same ranking factors, using bounce rate data, to assess specific site query and URL relevance.

Here is an example of what I am talking about… let’s say that a Google surfer is looking for a specific query “Laptop Memory”, and they land on a page scoring high on this search term, but unfortunately, this page has slow downloads that bounce the user back from the search page. What do you think happens?

You can bet Google will lower this page’s organic rank so that further queries would be less likely to rank as high or come up as quickly. This only makes sense! Google only wants to provide top rank for those who provide the fastest and most qualified results, so that their audience gets the quickest results at all times; therefore, a low bounce rate on the same query indicates an excellent match for the search query, which in return justifies a higher ranking.

Algorithmically, as far as Google is concerned, a good load time ensures that you are doing your best with your pages to make sure you meet their requirements. All pages should load completely in 4 seconds or less and now you can check your page load times using this free tool, called webwait. If your page load is too slow, we recommend you optimize your graphics and your site, or find a quicker server.

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