International Download Speeds Effect on Rank?

The first thing that hits me is that this is too big a discrepancy for simple an international request. I've seen it double, in a bad case, but your report is so far beyond double that I wonder if there isn't something else going on.

Have you checked your DNS settings? It's possible that there are problems that make the copies around the world act flakey.

I have similar issues, been working hard on page speed, that well known test website reports sub 3 sec for any page from any corner of the world. Analytics tells a different story, had one page report as 122 seconds, somewhere in china. How would you test any possible DNS settings tedster?

Where are you dsoneil and where do you host?

No disrespect but forget China timings, many a time I have problems getting e-mails to my own office and other suppliers yet quite often GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo go straight through, likewise IM!

I've given up trusting anyone's metrics about my sites's speeds, they're all incredibly fast and I have worldwide offices test them on a regular basis BUT if I were to believe any Alexa/Google crap my sites are in the slowest 6%!

As we like to say ...rowlocks:-)

I'm located near Toronto, using Fused Networks (a higher end hosting company) who colocate their servers in Chicago. I also use CloudFront for my images / static files.

I'm wondering if dialup connections could account for some of these long loads. Also, it could be a hungup Adsense ad, as I've seen that occur using dynaTrace.

Actually, using PageSpeed, almost all of my pages are in the 90s, and Google applications account for the majority of flagged issues (Adsense, Analytics and PlusOne.

There are several free DNS test services online - and the very best one is now paid. The point is just to check and rule it out.

If these big page speeds were from some parts of the world, they might involve satellite connections. But this is Australia... so there goes that idea.

After further investigation these high load pages seem to be ones with external images (its a forum) so ive disabled them for guests. Should do the trick.

Absolutely international page speed can affect rankings. The center of the universe is in California where googlebot originates for all sites, the further you are from there the more important it is for your site to perform.

The above is however tempered by visitors who use Google products like Chrome, pagerank button, or on sites that use analytics or adsense. Those visitors report back to Google how long it took for THEM from THEIR location... which adjusts your page speed average in that location.

You need to be fast from both California and from your local visitors, for best results use both a California based and local based CDN.

It may affect rank, but it's a negligible factor if it does.

Yes it obviously affected site ranking.