Negative SEO Issues with Website Page Loading Speeds

It was about 6 months ago that Google announced that website loading speeds were a ranking factor in their algorithm. For the majority of websites, this doesn’t mean a great deal – most will load a page within 1-2 seconds, and this is a decent site speed to be targeting for your sites.

Faster will always be better, so any small improvements that can be made should be made – and not only for SEO benefits. Improvements in site speed are highly likely to affect website conversion rates as well as any SEO concerns, and this should supply all the motivation that you need to resolve sites that are so slow that it could impact on the bottom line.

Think about it from a users perspective – if you have done a search and loaded a few, somewhat similar pages, with similar prices and similar services, would you “buy in” to a website that was taking more than 4 or 5 seconds with every page to load up? If your website makes people visit a number of pages in the build up to that completed conversion, would you hang around for that information to be delivered to you, if you could get it quicker elsewhere? In a high proportion of cases, its quite feasible that a user of the site would get frustrated and take their business elsewhere..

Back to the search engine optimisation considerations of website page load speeding – I have come across problems with a couple of sites that have particularly bad page loading times – averaging at around 7 seconds per load, but at times taking well over 10 seconds (and up to 20 in one specific case on a particular day).

Whilst this clearly affected the websites conversion rates as a result, there were very serious implications of this – which ultimately resulted in a websites home page being de-indexed in Google.

When this occurred, on searching for brand terms for this website, there were 2 pages being returned still – but no longer the home page. Instead, this resulted in the websites “about us” and “contact us” page being returned as the most relevant results on those sorts of terms.

What I haven’t mentioned up until this point is the affect that this had on core rankings that the home page had been visible for. For the first hour, despite the home page being de-indexed via a site: search in Google, and not appearing for branded phrases, there were a few terms that the site still appeared for with the main home page, but most had fallen 4 or 5 positions in the SERPs (particularly damaging when you consider that they were at positions 1 and 2 prior to this for some of these, moving them below the fold).

The problem progressed from this point – within 24 hours, the “standard” home page was still not in the index, but an HTTPS version of the page began to appear in its place, replete with a 302 redirect to the originally de-indexed home page.

Typically, a 302 redirect from a home page to another version of a home page, say from / to /home/default.aspx (or similar) is a good way of retaining the indexation of the root domain, whilst not having to resolve the issue as to why it cannot site at the root directory (for whatever reason that may be).

This led me to be concerned that the home page would remain indexed on the HTTPS version rather than the standard HTTP version. Fortunately a few days later the HTTPS version of the page was replaced by the one we wanted to see here.

However, when the HTTPS version of the page was the ranking home page, similarly to when sub pages appeared in place, the rankings and visibility of the site suffered, and traffic to the site for a few days was heavily reduced.

In short, I have seen evidence of page loading speeds being a real ranking factor from an SEO perspective – in a negative way.

Summary of Implications of Slow Loading Pages for Search Marketing:

1) If your home page repeatedly takes too long to load when Google come a-crawling, your websites home page can be de-indexed temporarily as a result. This means that if anyone searches for a brand related term, they would not have the websites home page listed in the search engine.

2) Website load speed IS a ranking factor for Google, and as a result of the above issue, in conjunction with the page load speeds, it can cause a websites visibility in organic search to drop, in spite of other best efforts to see that website ranking as prominently as possible.

3) Website load speed is also a factor in the quality scores of PPC campaigns – as I understand it, the quality score in the PPC accounts is a factor that lowers the position of the ads, making you have to increase bids to maintain position.

4) Website Usability and Conversion – with all the efforts that are taken to drive relevant traffic, through all sorts of means, to a website in an effort to drive business leads, by the time a user reaches the a slow loading web page, it is quite likely that a % of the websites users either leave very quickly, or have left before the page has even finished loading.

Closing

With these sites, we have now managed to get site speeds to more manageable, stable levels, although have still not achieved the benchmark target that we have been aiming for.

As a benchmark, I think most websites should be aiming to have their pages load within 2 seconds, and if it’s possible to do so, should be aiming for 1 second if at all possible.

I hope in a few months that I will be able to follow up with a look at some of the positive effects that having improved the site speeds has had on a websites visibility in search engines, along with some insight into the improvement in conversion rates as a result of this