A Google engineer confirms it

Nov 15, 2006 08:07 GMT  ·  By

Yesterday, I told you about the virtual hosted vs. dedicated IP's websites and the fact that Google's PageRank is influenced by the number of sites hosted on the same IP address.

Imagine having multiple sites on the same IP using the same bandwidth and same resources. It's obvious that the loading time will be increased by the quality of the internet connection so, a webpage hosted on a single IP will be loaded faster than one that is located among other websites on the same computer.

Following these statements, more and more developers are asking themselves if the loading time of a webpage will influence somehow the position in search engines' ranks. But don't imagine that your website will still be indexed by Google if the loading time is around 5 minutes, because every client has some limits to accept or reject websites.

Matt Cutts, Google engineer, posted a message on his blog to confirm that loading time doesn't matter for page rankings: "someone asked about this, so here's a quick one. It's fine to run your website off your home DSL, as long as you configure your webserver correctly. This is an extension of the "virtual hosting vs. dedicated IP doesn't matter" idea. As long as Google can load your web pages, it doesn't really make a different whether the pages load in half a second or 5 seconds."