The E-Commerce SEO Game May Soon Have To Deal With Page Load Speed
Written by Evan SchumanDecember 2nd, 2009
If an E-Commerce director had to choose a single marketing weapon, there's little doubt that an effective search engine optimization (SEO) campaign would be among the director's first choices. After all, the retailer that comes up first when a Google search simply seeks HDTVs or a Yahoo search wants Wii purchase points or a Bing inquiry asks for refrigerators stands to make a generous extra helping of cash.
It's for that reason the word trickling out of Google saying page load speed will likely become a criteria in how sites rank is noteworthy. Google Software Engineer Matt Cutts spoke at PubCon last month and said that a speed-influenced ranking won't happen in time for this holiday season, but it's seriously being considered for early next year. "We're starting to think more and more about 'Should speed be a factor in Google's rankings?'" Cutts said. "Historically, we haven't used it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the Web should be fast. It should be a good experience, so it’s sort of fair to say 'If you're a faster site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus.'"
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3 Comments | Read The E-Commerce SEO Game May Soon Have To Deal With Page Load Speed
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Our Comment SPAM system is getting very aggressive these days and has been blocking legitimate comments. If you post a comment and don't see it appear within 2 hours or so, can you please send a heads-up to customer-service@storefrontbacktalk? Ideally, please include the time you posted the comment. That will allow us to try and hunt for it. Thanks! P.S. We're working on fixing the system, but we don't want to lose any valuable comments in the meantime.
-Ed
December 4th, 2009 at 8:16 am
Very often performance is overlooked when specifying a web application and is often thought about at the end of the development process when it’s too late or expensive to do anything about. Perhaps now when the benefits of having a high performance web app have a direct impact on bottom line performance will become something that designers and engineers look at from the beginning.
December 4th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
As a consumer I know that if all the ads and other wiz-bang stuff on a page is held up by a slow secondary servers or other outsourced links, I just move on and try another site from the search.
Grins
December 10th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
I’m not going to believe that just by having a faster site than my competitors I’ll rank over them. I personally believe that what google is saying is that if you have a site slower than the average you might get some sort of penalization in your rankings.