The Good News

Google started to improve it’s ability to index Flash content a couple of years ago. Now it can see content within Flash files so it can index that content. And it can follow links within Flash content as well. So Google can now tell what lies within an all-flash website.

The Bad News

This will still not allow all-Flash websites to compete well with HTML web pages. Why? For one thing, Flash is too slow loading, especially for smart phones, tablets and dial-up users. This is especially disadvantageous considering Google’s emphasis on page download speed as an important ranking factor.

With a Flash website there’s still  a lack of unique URLs which means no one can link to an internal page in an all-Flash site. Instead everyone has to go through your home page and follow any necessary navigation to get to the content they’re interested in. That conflicts with Google’s current emphasis on user experience as a ranking factor. You also lose many rankings factors associated with individual page titles, link anchor text, site maps and more.

So, What to Do?

• Use Flash, but only as individual flash elements on your pages.
• Don’t embed navigation to other flash content within your Flash content.
• Construct your site with individual HTML pages.
• Be sure to take advantage of all the HTML ranking factors available to your HTML pages.

Have questions? Need professional advice? Ask us about Flash and your website’s SEO.

Google’s recent algorithm update named Panda has caused many websites to lose rankings in a big way. Most deserved it, but not all. Earlier this month, NPR ran a story about a furniture store called One Way Furniture that had been hurt badly by Panda, mainly due to its use of canned product descriptions, which they copied from their manufacturers’ listings.

Apparently Panda identified the duplicate content and downgraded the value of the pages at One Way Furniture. There are some other suspected factors at work in their rankings plummet as well. Now they’re slowly climbing back to their pre-Panda rankings through a lot of effort:

• Removing duplicate content and rewriting product descriptions
• Using the canonical HTML tag to resolve multiple URLs that point to the same page
• Proper use of 301 redirects
• Paying close attention to their page speed
• Constantly building backlinks.
• One of the things they did was to hire some new copywriters to write original product descriptions aimed at being search engine friendly, and not duplicates of manufacturer descriptions.

CEO Mitch Lieberman said

For example, a bar stool that previously used a manufacturer-supplied bullet list of details as its product description now has a five-sentence description that details how it can complement a bar set-up, links to bar accessories and sets the tone by mentioning alcoholic beverages, all of which makes it more SEO-friendly. What we’re seeing now is what is good for customers and what they see on the site is also good for Google.

Another online publication that was badly hurt by Panda, DaniWeb, published a recovery story earlier this month. They cited their own reasons for the hit and what they’ve  been doing to get out of it:

“I guess it also goes without saying that it’s also important to constantly build backlinks, It is entirely possible/plausible that Google’s Panda algorithm hit all of the low quality sites that were just syndicating and linking back to us (with no unique content of their own), ultimately discrediting half of the sites in our backlink portfolio, killing our traffic indirectly. Therefore, it isn’t that we got flagged by Panda’s algorithm, but rather that we just need to work on building up more backlinks.”

Their experience reminds us to be vigilant. Perhaps Google’s page speed factor is more heavily weighted than we thought. And maintaining fresh inbound links from reputable websites is always important.

Somewhere within Google, there’s an organization known as the “Make the Web Faster” initiative. It’s based on the belief that the faster pages load in your browser, the better. People are no longer content to sit drumming their fingers while waiting for a web page to display. Slow web pages are a user turn-off, and we’ve written before about how that can affect your rankings, at least in Google. In fact, Google’s position on this is clear from this statement:

“At Google, we’re obsessed with speed – we measure it, pick it apart, think about it constantly.  It’s even baked into our quarterly goals.”

We include page download speed issues in optimization recommendations for our clients, and wrote about a tool Google created called “Page Speed” to help webmasters identify specific speed issues and which suggests how to fix them.

Recently, Google announced a great new tool – sort of the next generation page speedup technology:

We just launched a new open-source Apache module called mod_pagespeed that any webmasters can use to quickly and automatically optimize their sites. (It’s like Page Speed, but makes the changes automatically.)

Google says this new tool can double the speed of web page downloads, and do it automatically. It’s not something the typical business owner should mess with, as it’s a bit technical. But you ought to make your webmaster aware of the tool if you have any slow pages on your site. Google describes it this way:

mod_pagespeed includes several filters that optimize JavaScript, HTML and CSS stylesheets. It also includes filters for optimizing JPEG and PNG images. The filters are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who set up mod_pagespeed in addition to configuring proper caching and compression on their Apache distribution should expect to see an improvement in the loading time of the pages on their websites.

The improved user experience will contribute to your conversion rate, and the prospect of ranking higher in Google as a by-product is nothing to sneeze at. Here’s Google’s page for mod_pagespeed.

Last November, we predicted that Google would soon factor page download speed into its ranking algorithm. Well, last month, Google announced that they had, in fact, started to use site speed as one of the 200+ signals that influence the position of a website in their 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.”

The faster your web pages load, the more visitors of your website will stick around to see the contents of your pages. Web surfers are impatient and will often click away from a slow loading site before it finishes loading. It’s in recognition of that behavior that Google is factoring page speed into it’s ranking.

With all that said, it’s important to point out that 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.”

Here are a few tips to improve your own page speed:

• Choose a fast and reliable web host with a good connection to the Internet. A “cheap” web host may cause problems.
• Use as few images as possible on your website.
• Compress your images. Most graphic tools enable you to choose the compression rate when saving an image for the web. You don’t need to make users download a 10 megapixel photo to display it on their monitor only 500 pixels wide.
• Combine external JavaScript code files into one file. The fewer files the server has to request, the faster your web pages will load.
• Compress your JavaScript code to make the JavaScript file smaller.
• Combine external CSS files into one file and compress your CSS files.
• If your web server supports it, enable gZip compression (your web host can do that for you).
• Put tracking codes and other JavaScript snippets at the end of your web pages.
• Check out Google’s Site Speed site, which provides you with even more resources to help speed up your pages.

Over the past several months, a consistent theme that Google has been involved with is that of speed. In announcement after announcement, Google has talked about the importance of speed on the web, and how the company wants to do everything it can to make the web a faster place. It may soon be the case that how fast your page loads may have a direct effect on how your site ranks in Google.

In a recent interview, Google’s Matt Cutts said this:

“Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.”

High speed web pages may rank better in Google.

Based on Matt’s comments, it’s probably fair to assume that Google will begin taking page speed into consideration as a ranking factor, although he doesn’t come right out and say that definitively. However making your site faster is going to benefit your users and possibly your sales anyway, so optimizing it for speed is probably a good idea anyway. Then if Google really does start using this as a ranking factor, you’ll be pre-positioned to retain or improve your rankings.
Google is usually pretty good at providing webmasters with tools they can use to help optimize their sites. Google recently announced a Site Speed site, which provides webmasters with even more resources to help speed up their pages.

Speeding up a web site isn’t something most of us are equipped to do, so your webmaster is the one to talk with about this. It’s a good idea to check out your site speed, though, so you know if it needs work.

Back when most of us used slow phone modems to surf the web, the speed with which a page loaded was very important. Now that so many people have broadband, is it still important? You bet it is!