What is the impact of excessive code on rankings
-
I am working on optimizing a page that utilizes a template that generates an excessive amount of code - 4 to 5 times what I am seeing with competitor pages. The entire site seems to have this problem and we have, according to webmaster tools a a medium to slow load time.
In general, given the content and teh strength of the domain, I think this page should be performing better. I think the entire site should be performing better. Would it be worth it to replace the template I am using and replace it with a more lightweight page design? I would obviously keep the content and the url the same.
Typically I want to try everything I can to improve rankings, but this change would take some time, so I don;t want to rush into it.
Looking for some answers based on experience, not general best practices. Thanks
-
Thanks...would you say this page has too much code?
-
Page speed is a factor in rankings. You have to have it as a systematic part of how your developer thinks and how the rest of your team thinks when setting up features. Easier said that done, but worth the long term effort.
The adage, "when you measure it, you can improve it" is key with developers. Either let them see the GWT numbers or setup something like New Relic reporting or some other tool.
The page speed on one of our sites was increasing and then I was also noticing some 500 errors in GWT. I had our IT guy drill down and figure it out. It was a caching issue that each time a page loaded, a full database query would run vs running off the cache. Sometimes it would be enough that a page would not load. It was intermittent. He fixed it and look at how our page speed improved (see attached).
This was in the last part of May, first part of June. We had a great July (despite a slow first week with the holiday) due to improvements in organic ranking. Our improvement in speed was a part of this.
One more on this. I find the GWT Labs Speed tool can suck. It does not seem to sample very many pages. Also, in one site we had, it focused on the site search page and of course that is slower than the rest of the site so it was inflated. I like the Health Crawl Stats (that is where the screen shot is from). Then I can use other tools to test on a page by page basis.
Cheers.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking issue for new website
Hi all, I have got a specific SEO challenge. 6 months ago, we started to build an eCommerce site (located in the UK). In order to speed up the site launch, we copied the entire site over from an existing site based in Ireland. Now, the new UK site has been running for 5 months. Google has indexed many pages, which is good, but we can't rank high (position: between 20-30 for most pages). We thought it was because of content duplication in spite of different regions. So we tried to optimize the pages for the UK site to make them more UK-related and avoid content duplication. I've also used schema to tell google it's a UK-based site and set up Google my business and got more local citations. Besides, If you could give me any suggestions, it'd be perfect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media
Thank you so much for your time and advice.1 -
Anchor Text to Rank for a Keyword
Is it still possible to use anchor text to rank for a keyword that is not present on the landing page? Or are there any alternatives?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Highly Related, But Not Ranking
Hi Everyone! I'm doing a bit of research on a domain and I've come across something really odd. Doing a search for "asset based lending software" (not with the quotes), www.case.net doesn't show up anywhere in the first 100 results. However, at the bottom of the results in the "Searches related to asset based lending software" section, it lists "computer software enterprises inc" as the 2nd item (the company associated with www.case.net). Any ideas here? NdsoeNn.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QueTech0 -
Google Rankings Are Dancing What To Do?
I was been ranking on page no.3 for many of my keywords. Suddenly they all dropped to Page No.9& Page no.10. Now 10 days back one of my keyword got back to page no.4 & now suddenly today it went back to page no.9 again. I haven't done any changes to the site. My page speed is less than 4secs. Checked everything & all seems fine. No errors or manual actions notification in Webmaster too. Should i wait for the rankings dance to get over or should i start doing something. Currently i am planning to get fresh pages with good content added to the website for the whole month of July. Suggest me what to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Sudden and Aggressive Fall in Rankings
I have seen a sudden and aggressive drop in rankings for my site. The site was ranking #4 for rental insurance and now sits at #9. It was ranking #16 for renters insurance and now dropped to #171. We vary anchor text in our link building campaign and focus on getting links from PR3+ sites as well as produce content for quality sites in exchange for being a featured author + link. The site has not been over optimized (i.e. keyword stuffing, etc.). I would appreciate any insight into what could be causing this significant drop in rankings and what my course of action is to reinstate my rankings - Penguin?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mj7750 -
Can Affiliate Links Harm Your Rank?
Does Google interpret Affiliate links as paid links? If so, can Affiliate links harm your rank if they are not properly tagged with a no-follow? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Triple listing in rankings
We have a triple listing for the keyword vca cursus (Dutch keyword). But the page we optimized for that keyword ranks lower than our vca examen page. First we had the number one spot but now we rank 2 to 5. In opensite explorer i compared the competiton and we scored on almost all factors better. Do you know the causes why the vca examen page ranks higher then the vca cursus page. Is it possible to change that or reverse the triple listing somehow. And why does our competitor ranks higher?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PlusPort0 -
Why did my rankings drop?
Hi all, In July I started to re-energise my link building efforts by getting a proper campaign together to build links. Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen. Here a a breakdown of what happen: 1)Late June I noticed my toolbar page rank up at about PR4 which, despite only being a small part of the algo, was nice to see. Early July I started my link building campaign by getting together a massive list of potential link partners by using Open Site Explorer on my competitors sites. 3)Because I'm a bit pressed for time I decided to go for the easier links first. I sorted my link list by Domain Authority and started to list on high DA directories used by my competitors. I listed on about 20 of these directories. I also livened up an old links page I'd previously hidden from the SE's because I was planning to do a bit of Link exchanging too. A few days after I started building links from these directories I noticed my traffic start to drop off gradually. I also noticed the toolbar PR go down to PR3. I decided to stop at 20 submissions because it looked like this was effecting traffic. I also removed the links page I'd livened up which produced a temporary improvement in traffic but it's since gone on to get a bit worse. Traffic is now down by about 10% on when I started buying submissions to directories. I must add that during this period we have also been taking on new clients which, as a a real estate listing site, means we put loads of content on our site for the client. That content is also on the clients website and on other competitors sites. So there would be lot's of a content that appears elsewhere on the net. Not really sure which of the two has caused the problem and not really sure how to progress. Do I remove the links on the directories? Do I wait for this newly added content to bed down so that new fresh can take it's place in our results which we rank from? Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0