As ever at The Pixel we like to keep our finger permanently on the SEO pulse, so news of a search positioning shake-up from Google made our ears stand on end.
Google have revealed that website speed and performance are now going to be prominent factors in their search ranking algorithm that determines website search engine positioning. To accommodate these groundbreaking changes we’ve deployed the Akamai Content Delivery Network (CDN) to provide some of the fastest download speeds on the web.
Page speed is already an important part of the Google AdWords quality score and slow hosting has often resulted in poor crawl rates and poor indexing. But until now the performance of websites has not directly affected Google’s main search page results.
Those days are gone. From now on Google is giving a bonus to faster websites with better performance and in an interview for WebProNews.com, Matt Cutts, Software Engineer at Google Inc. gave the reasoning behind this decision:
“Historically, we haven’t had to use it [website speed] in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. 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.”
Google’s decision to give extra focus to well-built sites stands The Pixel in good stead. It means that developers putting time and effort into creating a positive end-user experience are finally going to be rewarded.
Google defines website speed as how quickly a website responds to web requests. The page load time is measured by Google to determine speed, as is the ease and speed a website can be accessed by the Googlebot software. Developers can test the speed of their websites and optimise their performance at the Google code website.
Using the Akamai CDN to deliver all content to The Pixel’s websites via a world wide network means that anyone accessing video, large images or music will receive these files faster and more efficiently than with a central sever – dramatically improving the performance of our websites, and from now on, improving the Google rankings.
Instead of loading all traffic in one place, a CDN offloads this traffic by redirecting to servers as close to the users as possible – anywhere around the world. The closer the content the faster the delivery. As a result end users will experience improved stream quality even in remote areas.
Akamai provide CDN services to some of the largest, most demanding websites on the internet. Their clients include Apple who use the network for their iTunes Store and the BBC who use Akamai to stream its recorded and live programs via the BBC iPlayer. Other customers include Amazon, Adobe, Yahoo and now The Pixel.
There are also other optimisations that can help to improve our websites’ performances to accommodate the new Google changes. The page loading order of a website for example, is another useful tactic. Loading large images and files behind the scenes and using serial loading rather than loading items in parallel can all make an impact.
The restructuring of code and the condensing of JavaScript to be less of a drain on resources are also factors that will help to improve performance.
So there we have it – there’s never been a more important time to develop a quality website built by those that actually understand the internet and how best to use it. And by ‘those’ I mean us.
Don’t let your website disappear from Google. If you would like to know more about anything mentioned in this article or how we could help make sure that doesn’t happen, please give us a call on 0800 043 1040 or use The Pixel contact form.