By standingtall on

For last few days, I have been playing with Boost and have found an interesting correlation with SEO.

We have a total of 20,000+ keywords, most of them ranked well in Google and we track top 200+ keywords through a software. I installed Boost last month for around 2 weeks and then due to a glitch it wasn't working and we didn't notice. I fixed it yesterday and got an alert from Google (set up through Analytics) that our organic traffic went up by 15% that day. Intrigued by this, I dug through last month data and compared the time when Boost was running with the time it wasn't and our key word positions moved up by 3 places on average (Top 100 keywords) resulting in traffic boost.

We are a high traffic coupons site so you may not be able to see that much impact on low traffic sites which are not crawled by Google very frequently but we could see the affect of site performance on SEO almost in real time.

URL: https://www.topbargains.com.au/

Hope this observations helps other webmasters - please feel free to share your questions/comments.

Update: Confirmed this correlation again while moving servers and disabling boost temporarily.
Cheers

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

john_b’s picture

john_b commented

That is interesting. If Boost is such a great help, this raises a couple of questions. What has it done to page load speeds when they are measured (and how are you measuring)?

With a busy site like that, is there any reason why you would not use Varnish or some other fast server-level cache? It is a long time since I have tried to run a Drupal site without Varnish, as for many sites it is one of the easiest wins among the many ways of improving speed.

Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors

standingtall’s picture

standingtall
Location Sydney
commented

Thanks John.

1) I used Pingadom test to measure page load speed and there was dramatic improvement.

2) Interestingly, I have just moved to Varnish. Previously, I was using Cloudflare but it has really negative impact on Adsense so got rid of Cloudflare. I have now disabled Boost because it doesn't support page views counts in D7 and my site has a lot of built in features that depend on accurately counting page loads.

Experience with Varnish has been good as well. I think any improvements in page load speed will lead to instant SEO improvements whether it is Boost or Varnish or some other caching system.

finex’s picture

finex commented

Well, we know that Google likes fast websites. I've had similar results on many sites after improving the overall site speed.

I can confirm that faster websites ranks better.

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by FiNeX
FiNeX.org
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mjcarter’s picture

mjcarter commented

Thanks for sharing, very interesting

abdobasha2004’s picture

abdobasha2004 commented

for sure page speed now is a very important factor directly, and indirectly as faster websites have much lower bounce rate and time per visit

coolhomepagesdesign’s picture

coolhomepagesdesign commented

the faster your website loads, the better chances of improving the ranking in google.

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regards,
cool home pages