Yes, it’s been rumored for months, and has now been made official. Google is incorporating site speed as one of the over 200 signals used in determining search rankings.
From the official Google Webmaster Central Blog:
“…we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”
Don’t panic (unless you have serious load time issues – which should be addressed as a usuability issue anyhow), as mentioned this is just one of 200+ ranking factors and there are lots of tools to help you identify ways to improve the speed of your site. The official blog post gives lots of links. But just to highlight a few, Google’s webmaster console provides information very close to the information that Google are using in ranking. In addition, various free-to-use tools offer things like in-depth analysis of individual pages. Google also provides an entire speed-related mini-site with tons of resources and videos about speeding up websites.
A non-google site we have used that provides a lot of useful information is http://www.webpagetest.org. The web page performance tests give you details including a visual waterfall breakdown of page load elements and time for each.
On January 12 Google announced that they, and more than twenty other U.S. companies had been the victims of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China, and also uncovered evidence to suggest that the Gmail accounts of dozens of human rights activists connected with China were being routinely accessed. These attacks combined with attempts over the last year to further limit free speech on the web in China including the persistent blocking of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs and Blogger— led Google to conclude that they could no longer continue censoring search results on Google.cn.
On March 23 Google announced they had stopped censoring their services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google’s Hong Kong servers, Google.com.hk, with uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China.
Andrew Lih, USC Annenberg Journalism professor and director of new media, suggests that Google’s repudiation of censorship in China has touched a nerve in the country.
The fact that Google has stopped voluntarily censoring search results in China doesn’t mean that access to blocked content will become easier there. Queries sent to Hong Kong about sensitive political subjects are now being blocked by the so-called Great Firewall of China rather than stripped from search results lists by Google.
But Lih believes this may make censorship more apparent to Chinese Internet users and may prompt more interest in the issue among people who might otherwise be content to remain apolitical. “You’re going to have great number of folks who are going to run up right against the Great Firewall,” he said, “and people are going to start asking questions.”
The Chinese government reacted by declaring that Google had broken the promise it made when it began operating in the country.
“Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks,” said an unnamed government official with China’s State Council Information Office in a report published by the state-run Xinhua news service. “This is totally wrong. We’re uncompromisingly opposed to the politicization of commercial issues, and express our discontent and indignation to Google for its unreasonable accusations and conducts.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on China’s strongly worded response to its actions.
According to Nielsen, Bing’s market share was at an all-time high in February, when it reached 12.5% of search engine providers worldwide. What is so remarkable is that this number was a 15% increase from Bing’s market share in January of this year.
This increase coincides nicely with the February 18th announcement that Yahoo! and Microsoft were granted regulatory approval to make their Search Alliance a reality. Although Microsoft has seen consistent growth since April 2009, when its market share was 9.9% (well before the launch of Bing), this jump from 10.9% in January to 12.5% in February is its biggest yet.
Searches represent the total number of queries conducted at the provider. Example: An estimated 6.0 billion search queries were conducted at Google Search, representing 65.2 percent of all search queries conducted during the given time period.
Google is helping promote breast cancer awareness through giving generously to www.breastcancer.org.au to run geo-targetted campaigns especially in Western Australia. White Chalk Road GAP qualified consultants lend them a hand in managing the campaign. Why not, it is a great cause and we may just learn something! Stay tuned, coming very soon (late February 2010).
WCR update multiple social networks via ping and investigates the use of Seesmic and other Twitter enhancers. Can we coordinate updates between staff? Can RSS help? Stay tuned early in 2010 …
Charles
