An interesting article (posted by vBSEO Staff)

Well this article doesn't surprise me that much, it seems logical that the lesser the pages load is the more it crawls as these are certainly automatic scheduled tasks that manages the crawls.

I'd say yes, you should perhaps turn off all the uneeded stuff and avoid using too much images :)

But I am not sure that forum icons would really be that much intensive in term of load, is it ?
 
yeah, Matt Cutts siad at the start of the year that site speed is now a factor in the algorithum. This probably means that it has been a factor for about 6 months beofre they tell us ;)

In terms of how this relates to XF - I guess because the delivery is relativly light weight to the end user, and easier to cralw for the spiders, and with both of these factors now being taken into account for the algorithum - your forums should be higher in the SERPs (all other things being equal)
 
yeah, Matt Cutts siad at the start of the year that site speed is now a factor in the algorithum. This probably means that it has been a factor for about 6 months beofre they tell us ;)

In terms of how this relates to XF - I guess because the delivery is relativly light weight to the end user, and easier to cralw for the spiders, and with both of these factors now being taken into account for the algorithum - your forums should be higher in the SERPs (all other things being equal)

He didn't mention that in his previous post though if he did then it would be related :P
 
When you read the first comment to that post, contradiction is immediately proven. My stats do not reflect that correlation in my Google webmaster crawl rates, and mimic those to the first comment, being immediate contradiction.

Very difficult to produce performance benefits for all your users, and even then, for Google's sake, it depends on which farm the bot is sent from in relation to your servers physical location which will also give Google varying results before Google deliver your site via their CDN. It is not unusual to see Google bot IP's from several different server farms upon your site, thus each will vary in download performance between your servers location and Google's server farm.

I do agree however that by doing the best you can to increase site performance is overall beneficial to your users, regardless of search results, thus can only benefit your site all round. The more best practices are employed within development, the better users of the site globally across all connection speeds and computer ages will be.
 
This article is just mathematically bad anyways. First of all, there's barely a correlation. Pointing out a small similarity that is not manifested in the rest of the graph is not a correlation. If they really want to show there's a correlation, do statistical analysis on the data and prove it.

Secondly, as anyone who has taken a statistics course knows, correlation ≠ causation. :)

Read this:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/st_thompson_statistics/
 
Very difficult to produce performance benefits for all your users, and even then, for Google's sake, it depends on which farm the bot is sent from in relation to your servers physical location which will also give Google varying results before Google deliver your site via their CDN. It is not unusual to see Google bot IP's from several different server farms upon your site, thus each will vary in download performance between your servers location and Google's server farm.

Ah yeah I didn't thought about that factor, nice pointing it out !
 
Site speed is a small ranking factor. Unless your site is extremely slow I wouldn't obsess over it. Focus on content first and foremost. I'm not really sure how this relates to XF either but from what I've seen so far XF is very Google-friendly, moreso than vB by far.
 
This article is just mathematically bad anyways. First of all, there's barely a correlation. Pointing out a small similarity that is not manifested in the rest of the graph is not a correlation. If they really want to show there's a correlation, do statistical analysis on the data and prove it.

Secondly, as anyone who has taken a statistics course knows, correlation ≠ causation. :)

Read this:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/st_thompson_statistics/

I think they have just jumped on the site speed bandwagon to gain traffic / visitors. However, the point of the article (site speed is now a factor in Googles algorithum) is still valid:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/site-speed/
 
I build my sites for the users posting on it, not for the search engines to crawl.
But I am just weird I guess.

Not at all, and I think this is what Google is once again trying to encourage website owners / builders / designers to realise. You make websites for people not bots.

By building a usable website with the end user at the forefront, then you achieve many things. One of which is to make it FastLoading - no user is going to wait around for 4 seconds whilst your site loads, so you build it lean to ensure users are happy with the service and can find content quickly and easily.

This should result in a circular effect of increasing traffic and higher SERP's.
 
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