Well its a new year in Internet land. The past year has produced a lot of items that IMers need to be thinking about especially in the area of how Google ranks websites. There has been a lot of talk about Google Caffeine and many people are already seeing the results of the combined search results, that Google has been introducing to their results. There are several blogs that I read regularly that have seen some drops in their rankings and it seems that Google is ranking blog posts slower than it was just six months ago. This slower ranking of posts has been something I’m keeping my eye on as it would hint that there is something new going on behind the scenes when Google analyzes a page and puts it in the index.

I posted before about how I will watch and write about current hot trends on some of my blogs and this slower indexing has affected how effective this practice is. Of course over the past year many people have released information in the forms of ebooks or tools to capitalize on hot trends. This has increased the competition with more people chasing hot trends in Google. It also brought out all the sploggers and many auto spam blogs have jumped up. Well a few months ago Google seemed to be catching on to the spammers. At first they reduce the Google trends index to 40 of the top searches and now its down to 20.

I can only assume that this is in response to all the spam blogs, but its also hurting the people who where not creating spam, but actually writing good relevant content on the topics that appeared in the Trends list. I thought of writing one of these books as I was able to do some pretty good things utilizing the information in Google Hot Trends in 2009, but now I’m glad I did not because I have not seen all my tricks mentioned in the books I’ve read. I’m going to keep those to myself for now.

But this does raise the question whether Hot Trends will even exist in the coming year. Will Google kill it off totally? I hope not as its very useful for webmasters. Perhaps they will just introduce some new features to help combat the autoblogs. One area that could be done in this area is in the speed of a website. Since most spammers have 100s of autoblogs on a shared or reseller hosting account then speed could be a way to cut down on this spam. Of course the downside of this is it would also give people who have dedicated boxes and advantage over the people who host good websites on shared hosting plans.

Of course people who have dedicated servers should be given preference just because their investment is higher. Its been long rumored that the number of years a domain is registered is a factor in ranking. The reason given for this is because of the investment a person puts in the domain name, but if you look at pure dollars someone who hosts a site on a dedicated box puts a lot more investment into their website in a single month than if they just registered the domain name for 10 years or so.

So perhaps Google is going to start giving a little boost to the people who invest in their websites with a dedicated box as it appears the speed of a website is going to come into play very soon.

Google’s Matt Cutts hinted that site speed is important to Google, and it may be considered a factor when ranking websites in 2010.

Here is an excerpt from the interview: "Historically, we haven’t had to use it(site load speed) in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much".

Last year Google had already introduced Page Load Time as a ranking element in Google Adwords ads.

You can watch the video interview of Matt Cutts here :
http://videos.webpronews.com/2009/11/13/matt-cutts-interview/

How to optimize site for better loading and performance :
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ has added a new section in the “Labs” menu titled “Site Performance”. This new feature provides statistics about how fast your web pages load, how that speed compares to other websites, and tips and suggestions for speeding up your page loads.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/introducing-google-public-dns.html is yet another tool Google has released for webmasters to increase their site performance.

Google recently released http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/, an add-on for Firefox browsers which can diagnose a number of elements which impact page load times (such as Javascript and CSS files, image file sizes, etc).

Additionally Google has released http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-analytics-launches-asynchronous.html that allows the GA tracking code to be loaded asynchronously, which also helps reduce the load time of your webpages.
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/11/introducing-closure-tools.html is yet another tool launched by Google to optimize scripts and remove un-necessary whitespaces thereby helping the site to load faster.

All this is in addition to http://code.google.com/speed/ where you can find many more tips & tricks to make sure your site loads as fast as possible. This isn’t just important to protect your search engine rankings, it’s also a vital part of conversion rate optimization – users don’t like to wait, and a slow site will lose customers.

So get to optimizing your site as it may become very important very soon. If you look at all these resources that Google has released the past few months all designed to help the speed of a site’s loading then it stands to reason that speed is definitely on their mind. I’ve been watching Google for years and they always have a purpose for money they spend.

Tagged with: • • •

Filed under: SEO

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!