Last Friday, Google announced that they started to use site speed as one of the 200 signals that influence the position of a website in the search results:

“As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. [...]

We’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

Will your website rankings drop?

Google’s Matt Cutts says that the change will affect only some websites:

“Fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking. That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page.

So please don?t worry that the effect of this change will be huge. In fact, I believe the official blog post mentioned that ‘We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing.’

The fact that not too many people noticed the change is another reason not to stress out disproportionately over this change.”

While 1% does not sound much, it can be a problem if your website belongs to the pages whose rankings will drop.

At this time, Google’s new site speed signal only applies to visitors searching in English on Google.com.

How to keep your web pages listed in Google search results

There are several things that you can do to improve the speed of your web pages:

1. Choose a fast and reliable web host with a good connection to the Internet. A “cheap” web host could cause problems.
2. Combine external JavaScript code files into one file. The fewer files the server has to request, the faster your web pages will load.
3. Compress your JavaScript code to make the JavaScript file smaller.
4. Combine external CSS files into one file and compress your CSS files.
5. If your web server supports it, enable gZip compression (your web host can do that for you).
6. Use as few images as possible on your website and compress your images. Most graphic tools enable you to choose the compression rate when saving an image for the web.
7. Put tracking codes and other JavaScript snippets at the end of your web pages.

The faster your web pages load, the more visitors of your website will be able to see the contents of your pages. Web surfers are impatient people. The average web surfer wants immediate results.

Page speed is not Google’s most important ranking signal. The end of Google’s page speed announcement contains a very important sentence: “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page.”

It is important to optimize the speed of your web pages but it’s also important to optimize all other elements of your web pages if you want to be listed on Google’s first result page.

Google’s Matt Cutts recently made a new announcement about paid links. Buying links is a very hot and controversial topic among webmasters. Should you buy links to increase the position of your website on Google? Do paid links help your rankings? Are there any risks?

Can you increase your website rankings by buying links?

Yes, you can. Links that point to your website are the most important factor that influences the position of your website in Google’s search results.

If you buy backlinks, you can quickly get high rankings for your website on Google. However, that’s only one side of the medal.

If buying links works, why shouldn’t you use it for your website?

Buying links is against Google’s terms of service: “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

Google’s anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts recently announced that Google has been working on new algorithms and tools to detect paid links.

Google has a report form for paid links. If one of your competitors finds a paid link that points to your website, he might report it to Google.

Google actively searches for paid links and it’s likely that they will detect all paid links sooner or later. While you can get away with them for some time (that’s why paid links work for some time), your website will be penalized as soon as Google finds out that you tried to game the system.

Buying links leads to quick results and strong penalties

If you use spammy SEO methods such as buying links, you will quickly get high rankings on search engines. Unfortunately, Google will completely remove your website from the search results as soon as they find out that you use these methods:

If you use ethical SEO methods, it will take longer until you get high search engine rankings. However, your rankings will grow steadily and you’ll get a much better performance in the long run:

Do not use spammy SEO methods to increase your rankings on Google. It will backfire on you.

There are better ways to get inbound links

As mentioned above, the links to your website are the most important factor that influences the position of your website in Google’s search results.

For that reason, it is very important to get as many good backlinks as possible to your website. The quality of the backlinks is more important than the quantity.

You can get links from related websites, links from blogs, links from social bookmark websites, links from Internet directories and more.