Load speed impacts SEO rankings
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On April 09, 2010, Google announced that speed would indeed be a factor in how your page ranked.
We all know that Google is obsessed with speed, so changes to their algorithms involving speed were a bit inevitable. Google stated that although they have an unhealthy obsession with speed, limiting load times saves them money by lowering their operating costs. Included in the announcement was a reference an article in Oreilly. (http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/velocity-making-your-site-fast.html) which strengthens their position on the subject.
So what does this mean to the average website? Not a lot, at least for now. Less than 1% of the total sites indexed will have their ranking affected by poor load times. If you are worried, the following are a few tools which can help you test your site.
- Webpagetest (http://www.webpagetest.org/)
- Yslow from Yahoo (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/)
- Pagespeed (http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/) a Firefox/Firebug addon
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