4 ms·

My pet theory is (in no particular order): * lack of https * lack of http/2.0 * lack of CDN utilization (aka lack of speed) * lack of Google backed advertising

• tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  Most of those are orthogonal to the quality and relevance of the content.
  • walshemj 10y ago
    slow sites and stale ones are -ve signals of quality
    • Steuard 10y ago
      Slow can certainly be a negative signal, I agree (though if the content is mostly just HTML and CSS without much media then speed only means so much). But depending on the topic, "stale" may not mean much about quality at all. I've had a FAQ site about Tolkien's books online for at least 15 years now, and as it turns out he hasn't been publishing much lately (being dead and all). So apart from minor updates every few years when his son or other researchers publish new information from his drafts and notes, the site has been largely static for a decade or more. It's very good at its intended purpose, and it's hard to imagine what I could do to provide a steady stream of new content to indicate "freshness" without fundamentally changing the nature of the site. I imagine that the same is true of a lot of sites out there, on a lot of topics that are far removed from the "breaking news" world.
• tyingq 10y ago
  Of course, you can have all those things and still be slow. Medium.com pages, for example, are pretty bloated for a blog. But perhaps Google is fine with an inaccurate proxy for "fast."