As the Internet world continues to wait for Google to fully push online its next generation infrastructure called Caffeine, its best to understand why its doing so and then how best to prepare for it.
Over 5 months ago Google stated its purpose with Caffeine is to “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions” and then Matt Cutts made official at PubCon back in November 2009 that with Caffeine a slow page load time will negatively affect your site’s search engine rankings.
Google’s purpose in its declared goal of making the web faster goes well beyond increasing general user retention but in its end goal of dominating the surging growth in mobile searches done principally on the iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, & Android phones.
There is no declared page load standard but a general rule is no more than a 5 second page load time which can be affirmed via page speed tools or within Google Webmaster Tools.
The main ways to reduce page load times is with server compression and reducing HTTP requests by externalizing your CSS & JavaScript references to optimally a single file with the CSS file(s) referenced in your code BEFORE the JavaScript.
It will be interesting to see the Caffeine Effect on Flash sites which along with it hamstringing SEO efforts its also a page load hog. Never mind that Flash is not able to render on mobile phones (exception being certain Android phones), although this will be changing soon for smart phones that don’t start with an I, but I will save that for a later post.
Michael Martin is the SEO Director at Resource Nation – based out of San Diego, California. In his 10+ years of Internet Marketing experience he has project managed & overseen the online marketing improvements to such sites for SC Johnson, IGN, Deepak Chopra, Trump Properties, Road Runner Sports, The Active Network and his own Google Android Mobile platform site GoogleAndBlog.com Michael Martin has recently spoken at SMX Advanced, SMX East, SES Chicago, Worcamp LA, Affiliate Summit West & several PubCons.
