Google Incorporates Site Speed Into PageRank Calculation

lee1 writes "Google is now taking into account how fast a page loads in calculating its PageRank. In their own words: '[W]e're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. ... our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. ... While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.' Considering the increasing dilution of high-ranking results by endless series of plagiarizing 'blogs,' brainless forums, and outright scam sites, anything that further reduces the influence of the quality of the content is something I would rather not have. Not that Google asked me."

Slashdot

[SimonTheSoundMan]

So when a site gets slashdotted and blown to oblivion, Google also ranks it lower. Awesome!

so, spammers just need servers...

[FuckingNickName]

...close to and prioritising Google. Gotcha.

Really, am I the only one to find Google a fairly poor *find* engine? I mean, for anything which might remotely come close to sounding like it's a product, you've got Wikipedia right at the top, followed by 1000 review/comparison/pricing sites. For a tech question, you have expert-sexchange and 1000 crappy forums with responses from the downright wrong to the gratuitously abusive. I barely use Google (or any search engine much) for their generic WWW search - I'm more likely to be +site: searching a specific newsgroup/support forum/journal/enthusiast site I already know has intelligence. I don't need Google using yet another algorithm to fail at finding useful information - just employ 100 people spending 8 hours a day tagging the clone/spam/pricecheck/etc sites if you actually want to make a difference.

Re:How about bloat?

[Captain Splendid]

You want Google to discriminate against sites with more advertising? Good luck with that, buddy.

That sounds reasonable.... so far

[erroneus]

Does this help do battle against spam/scam sites? Yes.

Does this help hosts of original content? Maybe... maybe not.

Does this serve as an indirect or otherwise passive-aggressive push for network neutrality? I suspect it might be.

After all, those seeking to act against Google's interests by lowering speed and throughput to and from Google would automatically get a lower rank. Think about some of the newspapers out there who can't get over their aging business model. Think about other sources of information who might also be a competitor of Google in other markets? At the moment, Google is the primary source for lots of people.

I must admit, I am having some difficulty coming up with arguments against this idea but I can't help but get a slightly uneasy feeling about this just the same.

Re:Sweet

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Mod parent up! Google is catching on to something us slashdotters have known for a long time. The person who posts fastest usually has the most insightful things to say!

I have an idea: Slashdot could easily incorporate average commenting speed into its UserRank and serve pages to excessively-first poster slowly, giving chance to other, more insightful readers, such as the humble me.

Re:so, spammers just need servers...

[GIL_Dude]

You hit the nail on the head with that one. I, too, find myself using queries containing "site:msdn.microsoft.com (rest of search)" (for say Windows API information) or using "-" in the searches to suppress certain results. Like you say, otherwise you get basically "a bunch of crap" - mainly from people who have no idea what they are doing. Just today I had a problem with elbyvcdshell.dll (from Slysoft's Virtual Clone Drive) causing Windows Explorer to hang for 5 minutes each time I renamed a folder. I tried searching that on Google - hell half of the hits were stupid posts of every file on a system at malware check sites, or bleepingcomputer.com, or other "is this malware" posts. Did I say half? Shoot - I just checked again and I think I meant 85%. The results for most tech searches are indeed useless unless you already know what site you want and include that information in your search. The internet is just filled with crap sites that make it into the indexes and get high relevance.

Bad

[dandart]

If another site pretends to be me or tries to sell products that sound like my product, and have more money than me to spend on servers, and are closer to Google, Google will redirect people to them instead of me. Bad move.

Re:Slashdot

[loufoque]

Maybe if you correctly used Last-Modified and Etag headers with a 304 Not Modified response, you could avoid a significant part your bandwidth usage.

Re:Slashdot

[FireFury03]

If a server can't handle much load, it's probably not that important

Or it is a very informative hobbyist site with lots of useful info on it, which is comparatively slow compared to a well funded commercial site that has nothing but marketing-speak.

TFA says they are looking at "server response times", but I can't see this being at all useful unless they look at the total page load time (including all the ads that come off slow servers).

Slashdotting, power failure, tsumani, cleaning lady tripping over the network cables, poor server-side scripting, badly configured web server... What's the difference anyway?

The difference is that some of these problems are transitory and some are more permanent. You probably don't want transitory problems to affect the ranking (here's hoping they average it over several crawls).

Re:How about bloat?

[sjames]

They would probably be happy to discriminate against the sites with more non-Google advertising. As long as Google keeps their ad-servers speedy, they could even justify it.

Re:Slashdot

[DNS-and-BIND]

So, a guy with a 8Gb per month website is now required to have a server with root access and his own copy of apache, which he will then tune like a whistle without even having to read the documentation? Come on, man. Shared host. Non-expert admin that doesn't even like to mess with his Drupal install now that it's working, for fear of breaking it in some subtle yet damaging way. But thanks for shitting all over a novice with that nasty tone, though.

Re:Goodbye home server!

[socsoc]

Don't worry, if you hosted it on your own DSL line and it worked, the traffic was so low that nobody went to it anyways. Or you could read the part where it says the less than 1% of searches are being impacted.

Re:Slashdot

[vegiVamp]

As if you can't do those modifications from the .htaccess or in your code.

There's no shame in being a novice, only in hiding behind being a novice because you don't want to read the documentation on the things you whine about.

Re:Slashdot

[binford2k]

So you bitch about not knowing something and then when people graciously try to help you out, you verbally shit on them? Don't ever ask me for help. And enjoy your wasted bandwidth that you're too incompetent to fix and to assheaded to accept help with.