DNS - Google Altering Ranking Criteria, Including Speed

According to Neustar Metrics, Google (News - Alert) recently announced they will be taking site speed into account in search rankings and will be using "…a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites."

As Neustar officials say, "search engine optimization efforts just got a little more complicated, and your site's performance optimization got a lot more important."

The Google Webmaster blog does, indeed, say that "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," the blog notes, "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."

Google also says "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."

Neustar officials are offering "a few tools and tips from Neustar Webmetrics (News - Alert) services to help you see where your site is at today and what you can do to improve performance." To wit:

Measure your performance. Determine which pages bring you the most traffic and measure their performance.

"Use our free full-page breakdown tool to measure your site's load time, DNS lookup time and transfer time from five locations: Philadelphia, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Osaka and Melbourne."

Test site speed and receive an optimization checklist using WebPageTest.org -- a free online service that measures load times by accessing your site using a browser in a controlled location.

You can use the same tools above to measure performance for your key competitors and see where you stack up against them, Neustar officials say, adding "remember that Google appears to consider (based on their 'Performance overview' graph) a load time over 1.5 seconds 'slow'.'