Page speed in relation to SEO

[LesleyPaone]

I cannot seem to find any information about this, so I thought I would try to get a few people's opinion. How do you think pagespeed is measured in terms of Google using it as a ranking factor? Do you think they use their internal Pagespeed app? Something during the crawl? Your GA site speed?

[LesleyPaone]

Right, I am familiar with. Actually what I have done is kind of interesting in that regard. The product I work with is a CMS that produces large CSS and JS files. So I have profiled the CSS to render the above the fold, then after the page is loaded append the full CSS file to style the rest. The same with the JS too. The reason it can't go into production like that is because the unsightly flash of unstyled content. But it seems the crawlers are picking them up fine for the cached page images.

[EricaMcGillivray]

You should definitely check out our search engine ranking factors, which includes looking at speed compared to other stuff.

[LesleyPaone]

It does, quite a bit better actually, http://screencast.com/t/nZtKg3CwttJy  and desktop http://screencast.com/t/xuMKM1KN  Most all of the problems are coming from 3rd party integrations. Like say with GA it throws off a deferred parsing error, a cache life error, and a minimize resource error.

[LesleyPaone]

I am hoping the risk is going to be low considering what is being blocked. I all reality what I am blocking is what Google grips about, mainly javascript files with short cache lives. A facebook remarketing code, a norton ssl javascript, a freshdesk chat app, a mailchimp js file, and their fonts. So I don't think crawlability will be affect and it looks like the page render is not affected either.

[LesleyPaone]

I am going to reply to the body since my follow up is relevant to all of the replies. One thing I have been trying is hiding elements when it comes to Googlebot. Basically the things that slow the site down that a lot of sites have, such as tracking pixels, analytics, stats programs, chats, and things like that. I have even noticed that whatever Google uses to render the previews seems to have their whole font library installed on it too. Any thoughts on this practice?

[Silkstream]

I would assume their PageSpeed Insights (https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/about), as that's the measurement tool they've freely given us. But who knows with Google...

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I'm pretty sure they're using something like the internal pagespeed tool but with probably way more data points to look at. I'm also pretty confident that they use another way of capturing the time it takes to load the first things on your screen so they can check how good or bad the user experience is.