Google Gadgets & SEO

Google announced a page speed service which would allow webmasters to speed up their websites by pointing their pages to a Google DNS.
To see what kind of savings are possible they have set up a comparison page where you can enter your domain name and see the savings. After the test the page shows you a video of your website loading the way it does now, and the way it would with the new page speed service. Pretty Cool.

Here is a video of the improvements that would be made to searchengineland.com loading as an example (it adds about a second, to the loading of searchengineland!). This illustrates a basic problem with the service. It can hurt you.

While this service will be undoubtedly popular (even when they start charging for it), there do exist some major problems with such a service. Many of the things you can do to speed up your pages simply are not possible with such a service.

I am very interested in page speed and will be talking alot about it in the very near future. I am familiar enough with Google offerings to tell you that the mod_pagespeed apache module on which this service will be based on has some flaws and that the particular tweakings that need to be done to truly speed up your site will remain with webmasters and their servers.

The page speed service will be a great addition to the web by getting rid of most of the more obvious problems that are making webpages slow.

If they start charging for the service (which they say they will). I think people are going to start learning more about pagespeed since the majority of the web page speed problems out there are really easy fixes.

In fact, I am going to launch a site about how to solve page speed issues that is geared towards general users.

Googles page speed is a great thing for making the web faster, but it is not the final solution to the problem of slow webpage speed. Depending on the pricing, it may not even make a dent. Think about how hard it is to get across to newbies that they have to pay for a host and a domain name. Now think about asking them to pay for some other service too.

Unless webhosts take this on for their clients, I am not sure a paid model is the best thing here for Google to offer.

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