Adsense | Tim Harper

Google’s site performance tool needs some more work.

Feb 3rd

I just read a nice intro to the new site performance tool (that is currently in labs) on seomoz by a guest blogger scotiasystems: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/optimizing-page-speed-for-ranking-using-google-tools And decided to check it out in webmaster tools:

The site performance tool looks as vague as all the other webmaster tools stats, but it does have some interesting data:

For one of my US hosted sites (Dedicated hosting on 1 server) I get:
Speed rating of between 0-20 On average, pages in your site take 3.5 seconds to load (updated on Jan 31, 2010). This is slower than 58% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (less than 100 data points). (Homepage size is 25.14 KB)
And for comparison a Kenyan hosted site (2 servers with double the hardware specs each AND a load balancer), I get the following stats: Speed rating of between 0-50 “On average, pages in your site take 9.6 seconds to load (updated on Jan 31, 2010). This is slower than 92% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (less than 100 data points). (Homepage size is only 6.88 KB – built for mobile)

So the site is really slow to google’s crawlers, but do they take into account that they may be crawling a page from half way around the world? I wouldn’t mind so much if I hosted on a server down the road from Mountain View California, but because this is Africa, I’m a little concerned.

Another issue I picked up is that google’s very own page ads and analytics scripts are picked up as possible solutions to increasing the speed in your page load times, as they suggest:
Minimize DNS lookups The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains:
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js
http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js
So, make your pages faster by writing your own analytics and ad server, and try to be located close to us, thanks google, very helpful.

So I decided to try a little experiment last night:

I added two google adsense for domains to my adsense account for the following two domains:

www.harpers.co.za

www.snapcracklepop.co.za
(Both are domains I registered for fun, and are purely placeholders for something I may do in the future)

Now it did take a while to configure in WHM as it involves being able to tweak your DNS and credit goes to Gary Illyes for his post at: http://devoracles.com/how-to-set-up-adsense-for-domains-on-cpanel-whm for his step by step guide. *Note that if you don’t have access to change your A records and cnames in DNS this is not going to work for you.

So now for the experiment, will google index these domains and show them as results in their listings? If they do I will be utterly dissapointed, as they are purely SPAM!! As all they are are pages with loads and loads of google ads! I can see why they would, because they are earning revenue from the ads, but as a google user I really don’t want to see them in my SERPS. (Thank you very much)

Now I will just have to wait and see whether they are indexed or not….