Download Speed and Google Crawling

Does page download speed effect the chances of being spidered?

[tonyww]

Hi folks,

a couple of questions about speed:

1. Does page download speed effect the chances of being spidered? I ran my home page through an analyser and it has 24 objects and takes 12 seconds over 56Kbps. Does this matter? I read somewhere that the bots strip-out all the extraneous stuff and only go for the text and html, so image size therefore shouldn't be important.

Is that true?

How do the images getting into Google Image search then?

2. I uploaded the page on Jan 1st and have since collected a few links from PR4, PR5 and PR6 sites. I've also created a blogger account pointing to the site (actually I am enjoying the blog for it's own sake) and opened an AdWord account. Nothing from googlebot, although AdSense bot has come and Inktomi 7 times. I am number 1 in yahoo, msn, hotbot, altavista for my keyword phrase but not even being looked at by Google. Surely Google must have visited the two PR6 sites I am linked from within a week?

Hope someone can shed some light on the above please?

Thanks.

[Critter]

I would think that download speeds as well as response time (not necessarily the same thing) both are used in Google's pagerank determination. The quicker you respond to a request, and the faster you send the information, the better your ranking.

Note that these variables may not be weighted heavily, but may weight the value of other variables in the pagerank formula.

[suggy]

Can anyone verify Critter's claim? Including your good self Critter. This is the first time I heard this...sounds interesting.

[Chico_Loco]

>> Can anyone verify Critter's claim?

Unless one were told as such explicity by Google, or thorough an employee of Google, then there is no verification of such.

It would stand to reason that the aforementioned would have some plausibility, thus you should considered it to be true and therefore ensure your site is hosted on a fast server! :)

[Critter]

Ah yes, fast server is good. But good code is better. :)

Recall that I said that there are two variables in the equation, transfer rate and delay. You can be hosted on the fastest server in the world with plenty of bandwidth and still have a high delay if the software which you write is, um, crappy. :)

With a slow executing page that ultimately transfers 50K of information it may take several seconds for the code to execute, but only a fraction of a second for the 50K to be transferred over the network. I would assume that Google would only consider the *total* time for the transfer, but knowing which component is slowing your pages down is helpful nonetheless.