SEO Tip #117: How is Google Helping Google Analytics Users with Site Speed?

Matt Cutts: Great question. So first off let me just remind people that Google announced this year that we do use site speed in our rankings but it’s not a huge factor. So maybe one out of 100 queries, which would correspond to 1 out of 1000 sites, might be affected. So it’s not the case that if your site loads just a few seconds slower than your other sites that you are instantly going to have to worry about your rankings.

That said, it is good if you can make your site faster because users respond to that and they tend to browse around a lot more. So one thing Google has done in the last or so is I think last year we introduced Asynchronous Google Analytics. That’s JavaScript that doesn’t cause things to serialize or cause things to hold up while it’s loading that.

And in general we don’t want to be on the critical path for anybody. Our mission is definitely to make the web faster. We offer everything from Google Chrome, which is very fast, to Google DNS, which also does look ups very fast so we want the web to be fast. Things like Asynchronous Google Analytics lets pages start to load and start to execute without having to wait on that Google Analytics.

In general I think most Google teams who offer some snippet of JavaScript are definitely looking very closely at offering things like Asynchronous abilities to load so that people don’t end up waiting. So I think that is the sort of future that you can expect.

In general if you can make your site faster that’s fantastic but it’s not the sort of thing where you really have to worry about this one bit of JavaScript that you have to include from someone else that isn’t fast enough. That’s typically not going to be an issue in Google search rankings.

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About the Author

Andy Johnson

Andy Johnson has been on the Internet since the its dawn(ie his first computer program was recorded on cassette tape) and his first hard drive cost about as much his current MacBook. His first byline was in 1993 for a local newspaper rag he eventually helmed, and his last “real job” was at a computer start up which ended when it ended. Throughout it all he’s freelanced and blogged. Now he is mesmerized by Search Engine Optimization forever trying to “rise to the top” for the right reasons. He’s been married to his wife Julia for as long as he can remember and has two lovely, wonderful children. He looks forward to sharing the latest in the technical best for all the online entrepreneurs.