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Apparently some search engines are penalising slow to load sites. What is the threshold after which your site will be penalised with each search engine? I've found my site is slower than 75% of websites and am wondering if this is why my homepage has been torpedoed whilst inner, sparser pages rank highly.
You can run programs which will tell you if your site is slow loading. What are you using to check the load time of your website?
you inner page could by ranking higher because you have more links to them? so many variables.
That's 74% slower according to Alexa.
Re the home page, it must be some sort of google penalty because it ranks really well in Bing and Yahoo.
I'd argue against it being page speed muffmoney. Whilst the importance of page speed has increased as a ranking factor in recent times I have never heard of it being the sole reason for a single page being thrown out the search engines, its emphasis on ranking is nowhere near that high.
Back in the SEO days I saw instances of just the homepage or even just an internal page being penalised quite a few times, it certainly is not rare for this to happen and is known as a page level penatly. Without knowing to much about your case it sounds like the same type of thing may have happened to you.
If you believe it has actually been penalised then I'll offer you my experience... cue long unnecessary post :)
I would say first of all, as hard as it may be, wait a few weeks before making any radical changes unless you know the exact cause. Google has obviously taken a dislike to something and is watching, the last thing you want to be do is to remove something that might be actually beneficial to your site which in turn could harm it in the long term. Remember, shifts and fluctuations happen all the time – I had one of my sites bum out from position 1 for a month, I did nothing at all and eventually it just came back and has stayed ever since, strange... but it happens!
If nothing happens then I would start to ask yourself the following questions:
- Have you been doing any debatable quality link building directly to the homepage recently?
- Do you sub-out any link building? Do a thorough check and make sure that no undesirable links are pointing your way.
- Have you made any significant structural/content changes recently?
- Have you checked all the basic elements which could be crucial, things like robots.txt and .htaccess? It sounds stupid but one mistype on any of these files and your site could be flushed out in days.
- Have there been any recent publicised search engine updates, like panda, which could affect your site?
Once you have answered them then you should have a small list of possibilities, narrow them down to the most obvious and work through them. Then submit a re-consideration request and the horrible waiting game begins :anger:
Feel free to add me to Skype (davemerry1) or shoot me and email on david@castlecasino.com if you need any advice, we have a small in-house SEO team and they all owe me a few favours! :)
Best of luck!
Dave
Ah, if only it was a recent thing Dave. Truth is the homepage has always been seemingly in the sin bin, at least since 2006, so there's nothing I could locate in terms of recent changes that may have affected it. Having said that I did employ the services of the notorious Ashoke Banerjee a few years ago and his worthless links did all point to the homepage.... but I was under the impression that links in could not harm you.
Ah, I see. I didn't know it had been happening for that long!
Well as with everything Google related, it is mostly down to opinion rather than fact. However the thoughts I gathered over the years all pointed towards the knowledge that you couldn't get penalised automatically for incoming links, however if a manual review came along then it was certainly possible.
Back when I was working in agency SEO we had a massive online gaming client who lost all of there rankings. The gaming client spent huge amounts on PPC and through this channel managed to speak to someone at Google who then sent us back a list of links, which turned out to be a blog network the previous SEO company had used. Once we got those links removed and submitted reconsideration request through webmaster tools it came back quite quickly - evidence that it does indeed play a part to an extent despite what Mr Cutt's or anyone else might say.
Have you ever gone down the route of a reconsideration request?
That is a very interesting post, thanks for sharing your inside info dave. It does raise the point that previous backlink doubters have suggested, which is that it makes it possible for a competitor to get you penalised.
I wasn't aware you could send reconsideration requests to google - do they all get read?
Of course, they all get read but they can't guarantee how long it will take and they won't give you a reply.
Simply sign-in (or create) your Google webmaster tools account and then visit this URL https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration, it is fairly straight forward from there.
From that point there is nothing you can do to see whether they have read it, but keep a look out for their head office appearing as a location on your WHM analytics - you might be able to catch when it was viewed!
Let me know if you have any other questions, happy to help out!
Yes it is definitely a factor. There are tools you can use like this one or this one.
The first will show you the potentially large files 9images for instance) that need to be optimised (compressed).
Google specifically named this metric in several instances so those of you with elaborate flash banners may want to re-assess moving to a gif or banners with smaller files.
I second the guys above.
Once I overloaded a website with scripts resulting in a huge loading time (like 8 seconds lol) and immediately dropped in rankings.
I removed the scripts and got back to normal position two days after...
Things like jackpot tickers, analytic trackers?
Exactly. Thought it was a good idea to install shitloads of java stuff on the front page - especially jackpot trackers :D
Google has a to0l in Webmaster Tools that wil analyse the load speed of your site. In fact they promote a Fire Fox/Chrome & Firebug plug in that will run it on every page in your toolbar. I recommend Xenu or Screaming Frog and go by the load time guidelines that Google.
Here's Google's external tool; pagespeed.googlelabs.com
I've removed a large chunk of javascript from sedotracker and opentracker and removed all jackpot tickers. Also took out most banners from the homepage so will know soon if this has been a factor, thanks for advice.
My suggestion is to take ALL of the banners on the starting page away.
Use content-related advertisements in the text instead or install a widget linking to you own casino reviews.
Works wonders sometimes!