Page Load Speed

Question about page load speed and seo

[thumo]

I am having a problem with my server which means that it's taking about 10 - 15 seconds for my page to load when cliked through from Google. Will this negatively affect my position?

[yowza]

Whether or not it affects rankings isn't the question you should be asking. The correct question is, "would anybody be willing to wait for 15 seconds for my page to load"?

The answer is NO.

My point is that there is no reason to have a high ranking website if it is so slow that nobody would have the patience to browse it.

Ask your host to move you to a new server or find a new host.

[diamondgrl]

a second for yowza's comment.

[thumo]

I accept your point and had considered that but I really would like an answer to the question so that I can assess the situation.

[diamondgrl]

I'm not sure if anyone can answer that for sure since Google doesn't divulge its ranking methods and it's not easy to test that one. After all, if you had the exact same page on a slow server and a fast one to compare, you would first invoke Google's duplicate content penalty. So you couldn't test it.

However, based on Google's overall philosophy, I think at minimum it would cause Googlebot to more slowly crawl your site so as not to cause as much of a disturbance. If it's a small site, that's no big deal. If large, it could take painfully long to have a full pass.

[JonR28]

I'm sure the google bot has a "timeout" limit which I would set at 30 seconds. No one knows for sure what that timeout limit is, it could be 10 seconds, could be a lot more. Who knows. I don't think you'll hurt too badly as long as you can get your server fixed soon!

[thumo]

Thanks for those useful responses. The time out is what worries me. Moving server as quickly as possible because I am in no doubt that I'm losing business. In the long term I sincerely hope companies learn that such stupidity as overloading their servers will count against them.

[Dave_A]

For my part in this I run search engine down in New Zealand.
Most of the spidering that we do goes on in the background and we don't sit and watch it.
At present we don't have a time out function built into our php spider but I have seen the result pages ticking along as the spider digs into a web site, some servers fly along and some go if fits and starts. I feel that a lot of the problems are not that of the server involved but the traffic between the hosts.
If you are hosting on a slow server it may be best to change your hosting provider because on many occasions, if a web page isn't downloaded within around eight seconds the client buggers off to somewhere else despite the content.
I have seen people drop in and search and then click and follow the link, many times they come back quickly and go off to a different web site if it's a slow one because the content would appear to be the same.

[duppyman3]

my index page links to 200 other pages which is generated from a database call.

This database call takes about 30-40 seconds...google has indexed it and done deep crawls on the links which were 3 levels deep.

However google did this in 100k chuncks...in other words the pages was like 250k but only the first 100k was indexed..I tested this when saw the cached index page on google and tried to do a search on product sku number cached in the first 100k (which displayed my index page) and a product sku number after the first 100k which did not show up when searched..so I just did 100k chucks every 2-3 weeks.