Prepping A Website For Google Caffeine's Speed Assessment
By John Vinson
Expert Author
Article Date: 2009-12-04
Being a developer, I'd say you spend most of your time researching ways to increase page rank. If not, then I have my doubts about whether your business is successful or not. In your continuing research of page rank, you've undoubtedly come across Google Caffeine. The latest update to Google's search engine is slowly being implemented into Google's infrastructure and should be at 100% some time in 2010.
Almost everything being included in the Google Caffeine update is internal, changing the algorithms of page rank. I know you're excited, right? One of the changes which have many experts buzzing, is adding page loading speed as a factor in page rank. There have been a variety of reactions to the news, and like always some have been positive and others negative.
Matt Cutts spoke with WebProNews about the upcoming change, "Historically, we haven't had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast" he continues, "It should be a good experience, and so it's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much."
Ok, so speed rank is coming. We might not know exactly when it will be completely implemented, but there's no reason to put it off. Load times are an inherent quality found in a page. If you're a good developer, more than likely you won't have to worry about speed ranking. In actuality, the update might turn out to be in your favor.
If you feel as though your site could use improvement in load times, a good place to start is finding a set of tools to help you in the process. There are available programs which can assist you in testing load times.
Once you are finished with your initial testing, it's time to go in and find out how to optimize your site for speed. I like to think of how you see ship crews in movies make their vessels sail faster, they lighten the load. I'm not saying you should go in and completely gut everything from your website. However, step back and try to find aspects of your site which can be lessened, or scrapped altogether.
A trend I've been noticing with websites recently is having larger images than necessary. Having an image intrinsic site isn't a bad thing, but many developers need to learn the saying 'sometimes less is better'. A good approach to images is make sure you have them set to the minimum size possible while still remaining effective.
Flash components on websites have lessened in recent years, as developers have found more efficient alternatives to adding plug-ins, interactive menus, and other components to a site. If there's no other way to add something to your site except using Flash, then there are tools which can help you optimize Flash files.
At the moment, we don't have exact data to show how important speed will be in determining page rank. Therefore, it's not something you should be sweating over, but is still important. Even without implications of page rank, it's important, as people in the modern era want everything presented quickly and efficiently.
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for WebProNews.
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