How Load Time Influence Your PageRank

Did you know that the load speed of your web page will influence its PageRank? This topic has been debated for a long while but in April 2010 Google finally made it official by announcing via their web blog that load time does indeed influence PageRank. In March 2011, Google released a web tool call Page Speed to help webmasters analyze their websites for load time. How the load time of your website influence its PageRank is simple. All things being equal if your website loads more slowly then your competitor’s website, you will have a lower PageRank. Because your PageRank is lower, this means it will also appear below your competitor’s website on the Search Engine Result Page. This is the opposite of what you want.

Why Google choose to use load time as a factor influencing PageRank is obvious. It is based on the fact that the slower your page loads, the less time you will have to spend actually surfing the net. Google has stated that speedy browsing experience equals a heightened user experience and therefore deserves a higher PageRank from Google.

To reinforce this fact, on March 31, 2001 Google also released a tool to help webmasters make sense of all the factors that influence the download speed of a website. This tool is call Page Speed and it analyzes your site and provides a detail analysis and suggestions on how to improve the speed of your website. If you are running a lot of JavaScripts, bet ya anything this is one of the culprits that is slowing down your load time. Because JavaScript are used so often by webmasters this creates a delimma for webmasters. This is because many websites use third party JavaScript for such things as advertising, widgets and social bookmarking.

This is not to say that you shouldn't display widgets or advertising or adding a social bookmarking button such as AddThis or Sharethis. What should be kept in mind is that there is a tradeoff. A lot of webmasters get a lot of viral traffic from social sharing buttons so keeping it off is not an option. What should be kept in mind is that there is a tradeoff, you will get viral traffic but your load time will increase a bit thereby slightly decreasing your pagerank. In light of this what you should do is choose one social sharing site that is the lightest in terms of JavaScript parsing and use that service instead of using all of them.

In conclusion faster is better with Google. It is important for you to investigate all the addons you put on your website to see what is slowing things down the most. I hope this article clarifys things for you and help you cut down the load time of your website. You can play around with Google Page Speed yourself. Just go to https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/ and enter your own URL or the URL of a competitor and see for yourself what factors contribute to the load speed of your website (and give you some tips on how to speed up your own site).