Landing Pages To Affect Google Quality Score. Fair?
In February of this year (that’s 2008 if my future kids find this one day), Google announced that landing page load times will have a factor in calculating your quality score. Don’t go crazy just yet, it has been announced but not implemented yet. And when it is implemented the first run of the program will provide you with load time evaluations and provide you one month to address any issues.
From Google’s FAQ:
The AdWords system re-evaluates landing pages on a regular basis (approximately once a month). If you make significant improvements to your website’s load time, you should see an improved Quality score and lower minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bids. Note that your Quality score may update incrementally over two to three months after you improve your load time.
I understand a page load time of 1 second versus 10 seconds is a huge deal, and can say a lot about your company’s infrastructure, but isn’t the goal of Google to provide links to the most relevant sources? Let’s see how this unfolds.
Now don’t get me wrong, I 100% agree that page load times are a factor in your user experience. With a slow load time, your conversion rate will suffer anyways and should be a good warning for you to analyze your campaigns. Unfortunately, Google hasn’t documented this enough to allow us to make a more detailed analysis. They did mention sites would get 1 of 2 scores, so my question would be what load time denotes you will receive the “bad score.” I see this as a free warning to the future success of Google campaigns - and you know if deemed a success on their end, others will soon follow.
Here are some listed tips on improving your page load time:
- Use fewer redirects.
- Reduce the page size by using fewer, smaller, and more highly-compressed images.
- Do not use interstitial pages.
- Minimize the use of iframes on your landing page.
- Contact your webmaster or webhosting provider to discuss other ways of improving your website’s load time
Now is also a time for small businesses to revisit utilizing shared servers versus dedicated hosting. Here is a nice piece giving a breakdown of shared vs. dedicated.
Links: Yahoo’s tips for speeding up your site.
Download this! YSlow is a firefox plugin that will give you a thorough analysis of page load times.
Official Google Announcement.
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I guess the answer to this all depends on how fast your site loads