Freakin Load Times

[kingcobra]

My experiment to refine the effect of load times continues off and on. I'm currently in the doghouse once again for adding a single banner, going from 1 banner to 2. It's not that the load time was all that bad, little over 40 sec for the benchmark I use, 14.4K or whatever it is, but that was enough to send my SERPs to crap, and I'm talking big time hurt here. My rankings for everything have doubled or tripled or in some cases have gone altogether just from this. If you remember my last test, I went to over 100 sec and wasn't even listed for my site name with the home page, just fell right off the table, and got it all back by resetting it to where I had it.

So I've set it now to even more of a min, no nav buttons, no banners, no footer links, and then I'll adjust it up to see where the sweet spot really is. It's a matter of the right balance but I'll tell you one thing, when my contract is up with my host if not before, I'll be running not walking to a faster provider, the fastest I can find, and who cares about that other stuff

[JasonDuke]

Ken.

I may well have missed some previous info on here but are you saying your pages take 40 seconds to load ?

[kingcobra]

Originally Posted by JasonDuke

Ken.

I may well have missed some previous info on here but are you saying your pages take 40 seconds to load ?

Sorry no that's a benchmark and it's actually the time it would take at 28.8K not 14.4, my bad. No one uses these speeds really but the point is to compare between different setups. For instance I'm usually in the 20's, went to the 40's to see what would happened, now I'm at about 14 secs. I had it over 100 a few months back and was toast and now I wanted to try a smaller increased load and that wasn't anywhere near as bad but still not what I want for sure. The trick is to find the spot where you can add more stuff like banners but not get punished for it, and I decided to get a benchmark for the bare minimum then add slowly to find it.

Anyone else who wants to do this, you're going to need to track your results before and after and we're talking home page crawl here. Keep everything the same, don't even do any real linking. Go up and down and see what the differences are. If you're looking for a quick and easy free tool to track your load times I use the one at http://www.sitereportcard.com/index.php, the rest of the stuff isn't worth much but it does give you a quick read on your load times, which is a combination of your server speed and page load. If you do this keep us informed on your results. You'll be surprised how much this stuff matters and it can make the difference between not even being listed and having a bunch of real good SERPs.

[Chip Hudson]

Ouch one site of mine is at 90 seconds, lowest one is 36 seconds...

Thanks for that link

[TheOPC]

Originally Posted by kingcobra

the rest of the stuff isn't worth much

The rest of the stuff is worth something if one (such as myself) didn't bother to use speel check prior to updating his page...

[JasonDuke]

I truly wouldn't spend much (any?) time worrying about load times as reported by that tool.

[kingcobra]

Originally Posted by JasonDuke

I truly wouldn't spend much (any?) time worrying about load times as reported by that tool.

I kinda need to get my traffic back though and it's not so much the tool, any tool will do and it's just something to calibrate with, for instance I'd like to rank for my terms AND have a banner or two on the site

[kingcobra]

Originally Posted by Chip Hudson

Ouch one site of mine is at 90 seconds, lowest one is 36 seconds...

Thanks for that link

Try messing around with this and track the effects. As far as I know I've stumbled upon this myself and it's not very widely known but I can tell you that it's a very real phenomenon. Load times and server speed are pretty controversial topics but they shouldn't be as this stuff isn't hard to measure. Those who tell you it isn't meaningful just haven't tracked the thing and as is often the case with SEO they are talking out of their hat

Just as a little more background here, I've always liked a lot of graphics on my home page and way back when before I started to figure this out I didn't really rank well for anything at the time, then I added some banners and found that it wasn't even ranking for King Cobra Poker anymore. What was ranking was a links page which happened to be the fastest loading. So I returned the home page to where it was, then created an alternate home page that was pretty sparse. As soon as it was crawled, the thing outranked the old home page and my rankings for other terms went up as well. So this is what got me thinking about this and I've done a fair bit of research since and I'm still tinkering with it.

Now this isn't to say that any change produces measurable effects, it's not quite that simple and there appears to be bands of influence and you want to get to the top end of the lower band, the one that produces the best search results, which allows you to add the most content without being penalized. Your server speed in general also factors into this as far as I can tell and mine isn't the greatest although it's decent. Comparing on IBP I'd say it's well below average and I've seen enough here to shoot for the top end here when my annual subscription runs out with Start Logic and there are some hosts that offer blazing speed compared with what I have now.

[JasonDuke]

I understand your position Ken and I agree that load times may deliver a small part to an overall ranking algorithm but that is such a small part that I would guess you are spending an unrepresentative amount of time tweaking the load time will placing important factors out of reach.

Off page, off page, off page and finally off page, are the factors you need to look at

[kingcobra]

Originally Posted by JasonDuke

I understand your position Ken and I agree that load times may deliver a small part to an overall ranking algorithm but that is such a small part that I would guess you are spending an unrepresentative amount of time tweaking the load time will placing important factors out of reach.

Off page, off page, off page and finally off page, are the factors you need to look at

Well I'm going to want to say Jason that it plays a bigger part than that but I'm in the red zone now so I need to get out of it, and in doing so I do want to know how much I can get on there without being hurt. I'm not spending much time on this actually but it's time that I need to spend. By adding an extra banner and some nav buttons, I've killed my SERPs so I figure that's pretty significant This is part of on page but not one that most people really pay attention to but when you lose most of your SE traffic by making a move then that big slap is something you tend to pay attention to

By the way I'm real glad you're on here Jason as since Randy left I've got no one to argue SEO stuff with and it looks like we're going to have some real good discussions