It has been more than 7 days since Google confirmed the influence of site speed in web search ranking. Site speed is a signal that Big G is considering with many others and it may not be a strong ranking factor as of now. But the ball has started rolling – if the webmasters do not review site speed now and take suitable steps to make them load faster, it may be too late!

Here are some free tools (suggested by Google) that can be used to test and improve site speed:

• PageSpeed: Open source Firefox/Firebug add on
• YSlow: A free tool by Yahoo!
• WebPagetest: Page performance and optimization checklist

Besides, the Site Performance check in Google Webmaster console helps to find out the areas that can be improved. Many other tools and information on how to make your website faster are available at http://code.google.com/speed

The comments below the announcement show a mixed opinion about the change. Some are happy as the speed gets importance, whereas, some are concerned about the websites that contain images, videos and flash files. People have also asked how Google will take care of the sites that are slow because of the Google Analytics code snippet!

There is no reason to think that Google will not improve the algo. Let’s wait for the Speed Part II to be released!

Continuous effort to offer better user experience is what makes Google different from others. And that is the reason, Google is putting so much stress on website loading time. How much time your website takes to load is a factor Google is likely to consider to rank your website!

Just think: a user runs a Google search, Google displays the results, and then when the user clicks on a link, it takes several minutes to load the page! Why should Google list such a web page that annoys its user? Logical!

Slow websites are bad for your users also. When someone with dial up connection visits your website and the page takes so much time to load, chances are high that the user will leave your website. So, you are losing visitors because your website is slow.

Google is so desperate to enhance user experience that they are going to introduce a new internet protocol, name spdy (should be pronounced as speedy) which is supposed to be many times faster than http. It’s own optical fiber based private internet is in beta or something. What else do you need? Get ready to type spdy://www.google.com/ in near future.

Are you one of those who believe that Social Media cannot return satisfactory profit and that investing in Social Media is a total waste of money? Then this post is for you!

You simply cannot ignore social media anymore; if you do then you are going to lose something for sure. Google has integrated real time search with its web search. Logged in users can see relevant updates from their social networks.

In a video Google has described that this integration will help people find ‘What’s happening right now?’ and ‘What’s happening nearby?’ very easily. Watch the video here.

Now comes the SEO point of view: isn’t it an easy way to make it to the first page of the search engines? If your website is new chances are high that it will take some time to rank high for relevant searches; but if you have an active network, you can actually appear on the first page throughout the day. For this you have be a super-active node on various social media platforms preferably on those Google is fetching data from.

Even if someone is not getting quality traffic from social media, they can get a strong web presence by staying active on social media and networking websites. Now, how to get quality traffic from social media is a different topic; will discuss more on it later. Keep visiting us.

Google is back into action with Google Friend Connect – another social network platform for websites (and of course blogs) without going anywhere else.

Ok, it is not just another social network as we have seen so far. As Google puts it – “Google Friend Connect provides a core set of social gadgets such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing”. And everything is there in a small java script so no coding required.

It would integrate your friends from other networks like Facebook, Linkedin, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo apart from integrating with other open social applications.

So now, you can try to connect with the end users of your website in a better way and even connect with their friends.

Google Video was a big flop and they had to buy YouTube. Now, when Yahoo has bought MyBlogLog, Google has moved forward with a highly promising network.

I agree that, Google Friend Connect is a lot different from other networks like MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog – but in essence it is also a promotional network like these two. Isn’t it?

Let’s wait and watch:

Related stories from other sources:

Tech Crunch | Yahoo News | Read Write Web | Oreilly

Today I noticed an interesting thing.

I was searching for some linkbaiting tips and found this article “13 linkbaiting tips that may sell”. I knew it was written for article syndication.

I searched the title in Google.com as “13 linkbaiting tips that may sell” to find out how many sites syndicated that article. (There was nothing great in these articles being syndicated all over the web.)

But the interesting thing is that, Google showed the original site (outgoing links in that article were pointing to Vertical-Leap.co.uk) in the result page though that sentence (13 linkbaiting tips that may sell) was not there in that site’s home page.

That article used the following anchor texts:

SEO company, SEO content writing, search engine marketing

Among these three key phrase only ‘SEO company’ was pointing to the home page (others were pointing to the internal pages of that website).

I looked for the cached page of that site and found an interesting note by Google: “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: 13 linkbaiting tips that may sell” (highlighted in the image).

[Click to enlarge]

In fact the site is getting some rank for the keyword “linkbaiting tips” (within inverted comma) too.

So what is the big deal? I got some questions for webmasters:

• What about the duplicate content issue?
• While link building, we emphasize on the anchor text number of outgoing links, relevancy of other links etc. Now, should we also start considering the title of the page from where we are getting links! (‘13 linkbaiting tips that may sell’ is the title of most of the pages.)
• Should webmasters stop article promotion or should they start it with more energy?

Any idea?