Sometimes it seems like one of my hosts is really slow in serving pages. It could display the page immediately, or it might take up to 5 to 8 seconds to serve the first webpage of the request. After that, it’s generally faster but I’m concerned that the slow serving speed of the host might affect my PageRank. Will it?
Michael Cyger
[ Admin ]
It took me a while to find the link, but I knew that I’d seen this answer in the past!
According to Matt Cutts, Google SEO guru, load speed doesn’t make a difference in PageRank. Here’s the link to his video so you can watch it for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3zmP0W26M0&feature=related
In summary of the video: Back on April 28, 2009 — as long as the page serves up the HTML before Googlebot leaves the site (doesn’t timeout, etc.), Googlebot will index the content — it made no difference how fast your website was.
However, on April 09, 2010 Google’s blog said the following, “today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed.” Be sure to read the whole blog page at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html because it has some great information and tools for webmasters.
As an aside, the video also provided some good webmaster hygiene information:
- Don’t include multiple Javascript files on each page, when you could combine them all into one.
- Don’t make your images huge (filesize) when the image is actually tiny (visually, on the screen).
- “Minify” (is that a word?) or compact your pages with something like gzip to make them smaller to load.
I would contact your technical support team at the hosting company to ask them why your initial webpage load is taking so long, compared to subsequent http requests. You may just have some setting setup incorrectly.
