Google ranking changes: A slow website will bury you

[tinggg]

Recent announcement from Matt Cutts, Google's "SEO spokesman" at PubCon confirms that website speed is becoming an ranking factor for Google organic search. Fast page load = postive ranking factor.

A friend has just moved to hosting (not dedicated) where a website accelerator has been added to the server her sites are hosted on as part of the hosting package, she says the improvement in page load time is incredible.

Have Hostgator any plans to do this? I think it would be a good idea, i'd pay a bit more.

*she just emailed me, the accelerator is called aptimize WAX

[techfrag]

Yes, I am looking for Host Gator to offer shared hosting some HTTP compression support or may have to look elsewhere. Google and the industry is evolving, Host Gator needs to do the same IMO.

That is only think I do not like here at Host Gator the lack of support for mod deflate for shared hosting.

[tinggg]

Agreed techfrag, would be good to see HostGator looking to enhance its shared hosting plan this way - I don't really want to move either but I think website speed is going to become significantly more important from next year and i'd would be interested in hearing if HG will grow to respond to this.

[GatorFord]

Unfortunately mod_deflate is not something we find suitable for a shared hosting environment due to problems which can arise from the use of this and especially due to it's propensity to fill /tmp with random data.

Can you let me know of this announcement you're speaking of which indicates that HTTP compression is necessary for search engine ranking?

Also, all our page loads and sites hosted on our network should be loading quickly. If you're having a problem with the speed of a site on one of our servers please PM me a ticket number or domain you're having issues with so I can take a look at it.

[tinggg]

Hi

There's lots online about it, Matt Cutts from Google made the announcement last week at PubCon, here's one article:

http://searchengineland.com/site-spe...g-factor-29793

[quietFinn]

Originally Posted by tinggg

Hi

There's lots online about it, Matt Cutts from Google made the announcement last week at PubCon, here's one article:

http://searchengineland.com/site-spe...g-factor-29793

As far as I understand that does not answer GatorFord's question:

Originally Posted by GatorFord

Can you let me know of this announcement you're speaking of which indicates that HTTP compression is necessary for search engine ranking?

[tinggg]

quietFinn - if you read the thread I did not mention that the announcement said HTTP compression is necessary for ranking - I said website speed is being introduced as a ranking factor. The second poster said he would like to see HTTP compression as part of shared hosting - I would too along with any other measures that will help increase the page load speeds of my sites hosted with Hostgator.

[GvilleRick]

The article linked mentions that load speed would just be one more (of some 200) factors. If the http compression causes additional load or stability problems on shared hosting then the problems could well outweigh the benefits.

[tinggg]

Some ranking factors are weighted higher than others so it remains to be seen how important this factor turns out to be - 200 factors are not of equal influence.

[gwyneth]

Originally Posted by tinggg

quietFinn - if you read the thread I did not mention that the announcement said HTTP compression is necessary for ranking - I said website speed is being introduced as a ranking factor.

I'm guessing that GatorFord was subtly trying to convey that there are many other ways to increase site speed, most within the purview of the siteholder.

[EarlyOut]

Originally Posted by gwyneth

I'm guessing that GatorFord was subtly trying to convey that there are many other ways to increase site speed, most within the purview of the siteholder.

Indeed. That was my first reaction upon reading this thread.

Most sites are graphics-heavy, and things like JPGs and FLVs are already as compressed as they can get (try zipping a group of image files, and see how much space you save, for example). So, if you've got a page that consists of 15k of HTML and CSS code and 800k of images, all the compression in the world isn't going to make any difference in site response.

It's certainly not going to overcome bloated, poorly-written, non-optimized scripts or badly-indexed databases, which are much more likely to be the cause of slow site response than anything else.

If your site has mountains of heavily formatted text, compression might help, but otherwise.....

[techfrag]

Originally Posted by GatorFord

Unfortunately mod_deflate is not something we find suitable for a shared hosting environment due to problems which can arise from the use of this and especially due to it's propensity to fill /tmp with random data.

Can you let me know of this announcement you're speaking of which indicates that HTTP compression is necessary for search engine ranking?

Also, all our page loads and sites hosted on our network should be loading quickly. If you're having a problem with the speed of a site on one of our servers please PM me a ticket number or domain you're having issues with so I can take a look at it.

My site isn't slow for me, I have highspeed. What about a dialup user connected to my site, its going to be really slow for them since the site is 256kb uncompressed. If it were compressed it would be 45-50kb. So, its not YOUR server being slow - its the lack of technology on your servers thats making it slower on the browser-end. That's my primary concern.

.. and yes, I have optimized all of the graphics, content, consolidated JS and even created CSS sprites so that only one image downloads instead many.

Then again, we have google ranking sites better that download quicker or have more content per kb which I think is key here.

[EarlyOut]

Originally Posted by techfrag

What about a dialup user connected to my site, its going to be really slow for them since the site is 256kb uncompressed.

Is Google going to be testing the page-loading speed of sites using dial-up connections?

[GatorFord]

Basically, Rick is correct here; there are some technical problems that mod_deflate poses when being run in a shared or reseller environment (such as the filling of /tmp with arbitrary data, among others) which prevent this from being suitable for us in a shared/reseller environment.

We have no problems getting a dedicated server or VPS setup with mod_deflate compression support, so if this is something critical for you or you're tailoring to dial-up users then we can get you setup on VPS or dedicated but unfortunately mod_deflate is not something that I see us offering on shared or reseller in the near future.

[techfrag]

Originally Posted by EarlyOut

Is Google going to be testing the page-loading speed of sites using dial-up connections?

No, I am not talking about Google at this point. While yes, it would be nice to get the 1-3 second faster page by having deflate for google and highspeed users, im strictly talking about slower than highspeed (ISDN, dialup, etc).

[techfrag]

Originally Posted by GatorFord

Basically, Rick is correct here; there are some technical problems that mod_deflate poses when being run in a shared or reseller environment (such as the filling of /tmp with arbitrary data, among others) which prevent this from being suitable for us in a shared/reseller environment.

We have no problems getting a dedicated server or VPS setup with mod_deflate compression support, so if this is something critical for you or you're tailoring to dial-up users then we can get you setup on VPS or dedicated but unfortunately mod_deflate is not something that I see us offering on shared or reseller in the near future.

I don't see any VPS solutions on your web site. Are these custom solutions not advertised or am I missing something?

[quietFinn]

Originally Posted by techfrag

I don't see any VPS solutions on your web site. Are these custom solutions not advertised or am I missing something?

http://forums.hostgator.com/linux-vp...ch-t58359.html

You can order here: http://www.hostgator.com/vps-hosting/

[gwyneth]

Originally Posted by EarlyOut

It's certainly not going to overcome bloated, poorly-written, non-optimized scripts or badly-indexed databases, which are much more likely to be the cause of slow site response than anything else.

Or DNS info that's partially wrong.

Or bad CSS, defined as a zillion divs within wrappers, particularly adaptations from elaborate table-built themes for CMSes. Or redundant and inline-heavy style use.

[Abomination]

Since this thread is about google, what does google think 'slow' is? 100ms? 1s? 3?

[whoeveryouare]

Originally Posted by Abomination

Since this thread is about google, what does google think 'slow' is? 100ms? 1s? 3?

and how can we learn our website speed?

[tinggg]

So, its not YOUR server being slow - its the lack of technology on your servers thats making it slower on the browser-end. That's my primary concern.

techfrag is spot on.

Yes, hand tuning your pages gets some optimization but nothing like what can be done at server level with acceleration software or hardware - if hostgator is not aware of this or the issue of latency then i'm surprised.

It's not about worrying abut users on dial up - the further data has to travel the longer it takes therefore all of us using US based servers with customers (using hi-speed) in the UK or Oz for example are rendering our web pages at different load times, maybe 3-4 times slower, just because your web pages load fast for you in Texas it doesn't mean they load at the same rate for someone on highspeed in London - as I said the further data has to travel (from server to browser) the longer it takes, the further the visitor is away from the server your site is hosted on the longer it takes. This simple fact is what is going to become important from 2010 from and SEO perspective.

So hostgator I think you should be thinking about it as other hosts are.

[GatorFord]

The distance that data has to travel is really a different issue entirely than compression. Our shared servers are already running on 16 core hardware with configurations that are specially tuned for our usage profile to maximize the speed that pages are rendered and load at.

Another issue with mod_deflate besides the /tmp partition filling is CPU usage, the actual compression of the pages themselves take CPU and in a shared environment where we have a large amount of clients accessing sites on a server at one time, the additional CPU cycles required to run mod_deflate *could* also pose a problem. Keep in mind that compressing data that is still going along the same route to a long distance host or on a suboptimal route is not going to increase the overall speed by an incredible factor, the initial handshake will still be affected by the latency of the route and the actual amount of data through is the only thing that will really decrease.

[alemcherry]

If you use PHP for most pages, it is pretty easy to enable http compression. http://elliottback.com/wp/http-gzip-compression-in-php/

[techfrag]

Originally Posted by alemcherry

If you use PHP for most pages, it is pretty easy to enable http compression. http://elliottback.com/wp/http-gzip-compression-in-php/

Yeah, I ended up having to enable the PHP Gzip compression so now at least my PHP pages are gzipped. As for the javascript, I query them via a PHP script so that they are too compressed and in one HTTP stream.

For my images, I ended up throwing them up on a CDN.

My site is now much faster and responsive, I guess no thanks to host gator on this part - but im happy with it for now and the final outcome. If the site grows, ill have to take a look at the VPS options, thanks for the link!

[a2purn]

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