Beginning in April 2008, the time your page takes to load the HTML, will impact your landing page quality score.
The good news is - it is NOT affected by the time it takes to load your images.
The bad news is – all of your landing pages on a single domain using the same keyword in an ad group will be affected by one poor landing page time. So in essence, it is your keywords that link to the load time, not the landing pages. Further, if you have multiple ad groups with landing pages on the same domain, the keywords in all these ad groups will receive the same load time grades. If your ad group uses landing pages across different domains, the keywords’ load time grades will be based on the domain with the slowest load time.
The total time is taken from the time the visitor clicks your adwords ad, until the HTML has finished loading. Once your load time grade becomes visible, your Quality Score will be impacted.
Now the obvious question most of you will be asking right about now is – what impact does the speed of my sites host server have on my quality score? Well, Google have that covered – load time is evaluated relative to the average in your server’s geographic region.
You can check out a keyword loadtime here.
You will get one of the following responses:
“This page loads slowly” – your quality score will be reduced
“No problems found” – your quality score will be unaffected
“No problems found – AND – Load time is faster than the average in your server’s geographic region” – you will probably find your quality score improves.
To improve the load speed of your page, Google suggests:
- Use fewer and faster redirects – set refresh to 0 seconds
- Don’t use interstitial pages – where user has to wait before being redirected
- Find a faster host server
- If your page is large – compress the size of your page.
