Google Ranking affected by site speed

Posted on May 18, 2010 by Gary · Posted in General, Google, Search Engine Optimization

Not so long ago, Google had announced that website speed would be part of their ranking algorithm. We have recently been affected by this with one of our niche sites. We were in 2nd spot on the first page of Google for some time for our 1 keyword niche domain which gets approx 110,000 exact and 368,000 broad searches in April according to Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I’m not sure if the exact search matters too much when its a single keyword domain! Anyway, we noticed that it had dropped from 2nd spot to nowhere to be seen just the other day so we immediately started looking into what could be wrong to have caused the site to drop. Now this can sometimes be a mission to find out as Google doesn’t exactly tell you whats wrong, you have to dig around. So first thing was to check Google Webmaster Tools to see if there was any errors with our website pages – no errors. Then I checked out the diagnostics section in the speed section, noticed that our sites pages were 100% slower than the majority of websites. Not Great!

This was caused because our site is using our own product database to display the data feeds from several merchants. Now because the site keyword is quite generic there is a massive amount of products to display. This was an older site which was using our old php files which didn’t have pagination so some pages had to wait longer than 1 minute to display all those product images. The solution which we are still working on is to go through all those custom php pages and modify our script to include pagination. This will enable each page to only show say 20 products per page and make the pages load much faster. Something we should have done a while ago.

Now the next challenge will be to convince google to put us back by notifying them that we’ve corrected the problem. Lets see how long it takes to get it back to where it should naturally be.