Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I manage a fairly successful, medium size, user generated content web site. For the past 5 years, I’ve attended every meet-the-Googlers event that I can possibly afford just to ‘talk shop’. Almost every time I attend one of these events, I hear a Google engineer say something to the effect of “Google measures end-user experience of our search results. Give the end-user a better experience and Google search will look more favorably on your web site.” I also hear the advice that page load time is the #1 contributing factor to end-user experience so web site owners should invest in as big of a pipe (internet connection) and as fast as a server as they can afford.
I’m surprised that this advice isn’t discussed more on WW because I've heard it so many times at these events. Not only this, but I’ve also experienced this principle over and over.
Last year I upgraded my servers’ internet connection to a 25 mb fiber connection, and my Google traffic went up 40%. 6 months later I bought a new database server with all the bells and whistles I could afford, and traffic went up 15%.
Ever since then, my traffic levels have been pretty much flat. I had noticed that if I get any kind of traffic spike, possibly from a news event covered on my site, or a pesky scraper-bot attack, my site would get extremely slow. It seemed as though I had hit the limit where I couldn’t squeeze any more speed from my hardware and a small 10% increase of traffic would have a negative effect on my site.
This got me thinking: If faster page loads means more traffic from Google, and more traffic means slower page loads, then I have a closed-loop and Google will only give me as much traffic as my site can adequately handle. This is kind of like the Google bot crawl rate. If you’re familiar with Google Webmaster Tools, then you know that the Google bot has some way of determining how much load your site can handle and adjusts the crawl rate accordingly. It’s a different end of the search function for Google, but it does indicate that they are aware of such metrics.
So in a nutshell, in certain situations, does Google only give as much traffic to a web site as that site can handle?
Late last week I implemented a custom page caching system on my site which has greatly increased the traffic that my site can handle. It’s difficult to tell for sure because of the holiday weekend, but it seems that traffic from Google has gone up 10% right off the bat and there's no degradation of performance. I sure hope that increase is here to stay. I think I can now see the invisible ceiling!
I also hear the advice that page load time is the #1 contributing factor to end-user experience so web site owners should invest in as big of a pipe (internet connection) and as fast as a server as they can afford.
Page load speed has always been a focus of mine - and I've long thought of it as a secret weapon of sorts, since there tends to be a very casual attitude about page load speed in general. There are some sites that I know have very useful information but also have very challenging page loads. Unless I'm really hungry for what they seem to have on a given topic, I tend to avoid clicking in.
Your topic is also very timely, because in June Google put forward a publicity push on speed issues (see The Need for Speed [webmasterworld.com]).
It's interesting that you've been able to document traffic increases from past improvements. Definitely keep us updated on any Google traffic changes that follow on your most recent upgrade.
