Does Load Time Affect Natural Rankings?
Posted by Al Scillitani on March 5, 2008 – 9:16 amAccording to a Google Adwords recent update, Google posted that load time affects your Adwords Quality Score, https://adwords.google.com/support/?fulldump=1#66238 scroll down to the title “How does website load time affect my landing page quality?”
About a year ago, the question came up regarding natural search: “Does website load time affect natural search rankings?” My answer was, that I did not have any proof, but it would make complete sense that Google would take into account not only load time, but how “clean” your site was. By “clean” I mean HTML and other errors that can be found by testing your site in the http://validator.w3.org
Though I still do not have any proof, I believe Google announcing that load time is a factor for Adwords, helps make my case that it does affect your natural search rankings. You still may not be convinced until you have proof, which Google may provide in the future now that they let this information out. For now, as a best practice, I still feel everyone should check their sites load time, server time, and check their site in the validator. I have other helpful hints from my last post First Steps To SEO
One Response to “Does Load Time Affect Natural Rankings?”
problem is…how much is too much. It is pretty vague as to what types of errors cause issues and how many you can have….i find it hard to believe that a large picture on a site would cause the q-score to tank that bad. I think they are hiding behind this as an excuse because some great sites, with good ppc campaigns are having q score issues…
By Dan on Mar 5, 2008