This month, Matt Cutts have declared “relevancy” again is the most important factor in search engine ranking compared to “Load time” and “content update frequency”. It is known that Google starts to add load time as one of the factor in 200+ aspects involved in calculating SERP ranking. Also, it is known that Google loves blogs or websites that update their content regularly. In time, it can lead to top ranking for several high competition keywords if we constantly update our blog. Compared to these two aspects, “relevant” factor given the most importance.
Question: Since we’re hearing a lot of talk about the implication of Page Speed, I wonder if Google still cares as much about relevancy? Or are recentness and page load time more important?
Answer: Now, relevancy is the most important. If you have two sites that are equally relevant same backlinks, everything else is the same, you’d probably prefer the one that’s a little bit faster. So page speed can, in theory, be an interesting idea to try out for a factoring and scoring different websites. But absolutely, relevance is the primary component and we have over 200 signals in our scoring to try to return the most relevant, the most useful, the most accurate search results that we can find. So, that’s not going to change. Our philosophy will always try to be “Try to return the best to users.” Try to give them information about what they typed in. But if you can speed your site up, it’s really good for users as well as, potentially down the road, being good for search engines. So, it’s something that people within Google have thought about. Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a way where sites that are especially fast, or sites that are really, really, really bad experience for users. It would be only one of over 200 different factors, but still could be a small factor in saying, “Yeah, you know what? This person’s worked hard to deliver a really good user experience in addition to be in relevant.” So, let’s show that to users.
Cool. I agree that regularly updating contents can increase SERP ranking. It will increase the Google bot crawl rate also. I have make my blog as lightweight as possible and removed unnecessary plugins.
Great work there Alvin. Nice blog you got there too. Wish you all the best!
Nice information Atniz. It again reminds us that we need to be relevant. Rest Google will take care of.
Thanks
TC
Agreed. Relevant will have greater impact on ranking this year.
Make sense that relevancy is the biggest factor. It is because the relevan result which will keep user use google to search something.
A good point to look at. I think this is the most important factor in all search engines.
I can’t imagine page load speed having a big impact on search results. That would mean new technologies such as AJAX, jQuery, Flash, and so forth would be a disadvantage to use.
The relevancy issue was important, though. It’s good to categorize the web into subjects as I’m sure this will do.
Page load will not be the biggest impact in search results but it will be one of over 200 factors.
Relevancy is the most important in my opinion.