Google the internet giant that grew from a garage start up in San Francisco has a competitor. As an underdog myself in the hosting world (next to rivals Rackspace) I have to favour the smaller player.

It is not often that you can refer to one of Bill Gate’s enterprises as a smaller entity.

But smaller for how long?

A little like a boxer who smiles at his opponent in the ring when he feels a punch that cuts him to the quick, he makes too much effort to hide the pain. Recently Google have been sparring in similar style scoring points with Microsoft over petty issues. In my opinion they merely give Bing the limelight and raise their credibility.

The signing of a 10 year deal though between Microsoft and Yahoo must hurt. These are 2 very large competitors joining forces, sharing resources. Both retaining the side of the bargain they do best. Yahoo running the PPC, (the model that Google plagerised) and bing with the search engine, who surprisingly is faster that Google.

These extra milliseconds set Google out from other pretenders over the years, yet the secret is out, it is common news to those of us involved with SEO and dedicated hosting.

Google have to be concerned. If you break down the traffic that all the engines get separately it doesn’t seem that threatening, with Bing’s share of all UK traffic at 0.44%. Combine it with Yahoo’s 0.99% and add in all the other MSN related traffic and it reaches a staggering 17.1%.

(Source: http://www.webcop.co.uk/resources/news/bing-s-surprise-growth-in-july)

It is interesting that MSN hasn’t made a move to acquire search providers that already use Googles’ search capacity such as Ask and AOL as this would increase their distribution and reduce Googles’ at the same time. I am confident that they will be talking, whether a deal can be reached or not, if Microsoft want to take on Google this acquisition accelerates their growth curve and takes out a further healthy chunk of the market.

On a wider international scale, I’m sure all the major search providers are thinking about the global strategy of getting Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia involved as the global distribution battle commences.

Why is this? Is Google acknowledging that faster sites give the customer a better experience? Absolutely! Is traditional SEO as we know it dead or is it evolving at such a pace that it has caught a large proportion of the SEO enthusiasts and internet users by surprise? Could it be that speed has always been a major deciding factor in ranking and no one knew about it?

Or did we?

For the last 6 or 7 years we have been watching clients with faster machines and lean sites soar to the top of the rankings. Not only this we have witnessed that when sites have slowed down, through congestion at peak times or with network or routing failures, they loose traffic and consequently customers.

A fantastic example of this and believe me I have hundreds was a site called Cheapest Flights.co.uk. The entrepreneur, Andy Speight, who set this up, built one of the fastest growing travel web sites in just a couple of years. Its growth was so impressive it attracted attention from TravelCare who ended up buying the business for millions. We had extensive meetings with TravelCare over their change-management procedure, as they decided to move the site to their in-house datacentre as part of the cost savings after the acquisition.

What they underestimated was all of Speights reseach and the lengths he and UKFast engineers and R&D team had gone to with regards to the hosting environment Cheapestflights was on. Speight had truly pushed the boat out, he deduced that slow downs at certain times during the day had a direct effect to his business with reductions in sales. He instructed UKFast to build him the fastest solution we had, load balanced, clustered, it had everything.

The results were phenomenal, his traffic went through the roof and the customer experience improved dramatically resulting in higher customer numbers, leads and direct conversion rates. Each time he upgraded the solution, the results just kept getting better.

I received a telephone call first thing one Monday morning from a very angry director of Travel Care. I was very distressed to hear that there was something radically wrong with the cheapestflights web site and that orders from their website were down massively. We take great pride in providing the very best service at all times even when clients are moving away. We have an astonishing rate of customers who return after leaving so we are careful to never burn bridges. I called my IT director immediately.

Neil Lathwood was perplexed. He is a lot more pragmatic than me. He simply called me back and calmly explained the poor results were down to their own network, not ours. He showed me the speed difference, it was staggering. Travel Care had moved the site over the weekend and the speed difference alone had begun to decimate their business.

The site never recovered and it lost momentum and credibility with search engines and customers. It dropped out of the Alexa.com top 1000 to become a shadow of its former self at an embarrassing 1,799,379th place when I looked a few minutes ago.

So why is Google bothered by this? Surely Google is just interested in land grab and their PPC model. Absolutely not!

If you understand Google’s model and what motivates the Google team, you will understand and unlock the key to true online success.

Just like Bill Gates said, “how do we become the intelligence that runs all the computers in the world?” when he founded Microsoft, the young men in Google have similar aspirations.

“How do we become the definitive doorway to the internet?

When you ask a great question like that, you start to look for great answers. In this quest for the answer, Google realised that they need to provide the very best search results and the absolute best customer experience.

Google analysed their customers and their user experience and found that the most important factor was not the number of links on a page, or the meta information, or one of the countless SEO rules we hear about, but the speed. The speed determined whether or not customers got bored waiting for sites to load.

We have all done it haven’t we, where you click back because of a tiny delay? Well guess what, they are measuring that and in our opinion, they have been for some time.

So during the discussion I had about search engine optimisation, I was challenged to provide evidence of Google’s stance.

Firstly, Google posts on their own site that landing page quality and Quality Score will be negatively affected if a keyword is graded ‘This page loads slowly’. The full details are presented by Google on the Adwords page below.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=87144

I have also enclosed a UKFast pdf which summarises the Google stance. I am specifically referring to item 4 on the ‘Google load time advice’ PDF:

http://pdf.ukfast.net/google_load_time_advice.pdf

Secondly Google advises website owners to contact their hosting provider if they are experiencing slow load time.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93116

My third and final point is more emotive. Google like any corporate body take their revenues very seriously. Yet they are prepared to sacrifice some of this for fast sites with good quality scores. Why is this?

It is safe to assume that as they take speed seriously in the PPC model, they also view speed as equally important with their non paid for search.

Remember this, Google does not publish a list of what to do, like the top 100 things to make your site go up the search engines. SEO experts have simply deduced their findings from things that have happened to their sites. (Increases and decreases in traffic directly linked to recent changes they have made.)

The problem with this method of research is that they are comparing these to their own sites that they manage and not the Internet as a whole. How can this be accurate? They are not able to analyse all their changes in relation to the changes all other website owners are making. This would take an impossible coordinated effort.

However, at UKFast we are taking an active role in trying to speed up commerce and at the same time understand the search engines and what makes customers choose and leave sites. We have spent almost a decade with an R&D team always around 20% of our workforce splitting the Google atom.

With hundreds of thousands of domain names on our network and clever pieces of kit like our CISCO GUARD anomaly detector which funnily enough looks for anomalies and unusual spikes in traffic or our IDS and IPS which track and prevent unwanted intrusions, our unique CTM software (Capacity Threshold Monitoring) we are able to spot a change in a sites behaviour in an instant. Often it turns out to be a genuine increase in traffic. When this happens we all get excited, contact the site owner and put on our Google analysis hats.

Overwhelmingly the majority of increases in traffic to sites are directly linked to an increase in server or site speed. So a leaner web site on the same server is a great place to start.

Ironically if you look at a well SEO’d web site, they are text heavy with very little imagery. It is highly likely the leanness of the site is winning the great results. Imagine what is possible when you upgrade onto a faster network.

And this is where the fun begins.

I remember 7 or 8 years ago, sat at an ISPA event talking with some hosting company owners. Their businesses dwarfed UKFast at this point in time. They ridiculed the UKFast idea that speed was important. They thought I was missing a trick and they both proudly explained how they were maximing profit by reselling the same bandwidth (contending) over and over and over again. What frustrated me most was they were so pleased with themselves that their customers would never know!

And businesses are still doing it. Hosting companies who offer unlimited bandwidth or terabits of traffic can simply not be telling the truth if they promise an uncontended network. What happens when the internet users start to use the promised traffic.

Take the top hosting providers who make these large promises and you do the maths. If everyone of the 1000’s of businesses on their networks, all demanded the traffic promised in one month, in my opinion their networks would collapse. They probably would struggle if people require 25% of their allowance! It is a nice idea to be able to offer so much traffic, but it is simply not feasible because in the long run, as the internet grows, so does the need for bandwidth. Sadly, aggressive marketing often takes precedence over common sense.

The good news is, long before we knew that speed was fundamentally important, we realised that with a name like UKFast, we’d better live up to our name, and the result? UKFast customers are growing like wildfire.

So a decade on, although it is immensely rewarding to be larger and more profitable than the 2 businesses who scorned our honest approach to hosting and this is clearly one of those occasions where less is more, I have to attribute a lot of our success to good fortune and plain old fashioned luck that we find ourselves in this position now. Still fortune favours the brave and I am a big believer in karma, especially in business.

Finally if there are any SEO experts out there who still need convincing, just remember that your industry massive as it is, is built on supposition. If you are asked to name the top most important SEO ingredient I guarantee it will differ from expert to expert.

Speed is one ingredient which is easy to track. Try it, the results are awe inspiring.

I have always been led to believe that Google does not agree with this, on the basis that it is unfair competition. It merely drives up the cost per click for other advertisers and allows them to monopolise the Google results.

I know that from time to time UKFast advertises under the same keyword. However, we do so only when promoting completely different brands. Each brand has a different marketing strategy so it is very unlikely that two UKFast ads are ever seen next to each other.

Whilst doing some research, I chose keywords that related to our industry. The two words being ‘dedicated servers’.

Immediately, I was confronted with a marvellous example of how you can take advantage of the system. The UK arm of a well established hosting company Rackspace, and indeed a competitor of ours, was ranked in spots one, two and three.

I spoke to Google this morning and they confirmed that at first look this is the case. They assured me they are already aware of the situation and it is with their policy team at the moment awaiting a decision.

I was pleasantly surprised that this organisation, who have grown so quickly, remain consumer focused and totally on the ball.

However, in spite of Google frowning on this type of monopolisation or abuse of the system, I imagine it is a very successful method of marketing.

Effective keywords are few and far between so it is easy to envisage the fun you could have if you literally own the keywords. Possessing the top three spots means tripling the volume of leads coming in.

But then on the other hand, I was brought back to Earth when I remembered a conversation I’d had recently. We’d won a piece of business from a company and our contact stated that he felt this cumulative marketing strategy was wholly unnecessary.

He’d needed quotes from three different companies and had to make many extra phone calls to really get a good overview of the industry. This monopolisation of Google top spots had really all been a waste of his time. Because of this, the way he now looked on our competitor was unfavourable.

So personally, my advice to companies wishing to use adwords to the absolute maximum is; ‘work within the rules’. There is no point cheating the system. Eventually you will be found out and it may reflect badly on the way you are perceived both by competitors and potential clients.

Examples of the domain names and their registrant details can be found below.

Domain name:
summit-hosting-guide.co.uk

Registrant:
Rackspace Managed Hosting

Trading as:
Rackspace Managed Hosting

Relevant dates:
Registered on: 28-Mar-2007
Renewal date: 28-Mar-2009
Last updated: 17-Jul-2007

Name servers:
ns.rackspace.com
ns2.rackspace.com

Domain name:
serverandservice.co.uk

Registrant:
Rackspace Managed Hosting

Trading as:
Rackspace Managed Hosting

Relevant dates:
Registered on: 15-Apr-2007
Renewal date: 15-Apr-2009
Last updated: 17-Jul-2007

Name servers:
ns.rackspace.com
ns2.rackspace.com

In a desperate race to out do their competing news rivals, the Telegraph and Business Guardian both have added Anita Roddick’s name to their pay per click advertising.

Traffic to the newspaper’s sites is so important; the media giants, who once ignored the Internet and search engines, now pay Google to forward them traffic. With businesses paying a premium to advertise on their sites it is imperative the newspapers grow their online presence. Any type of customer is a potential good customer and so we see topical stories driving the pay per click campaigns.

Personally I don’t view it as a bad thing as I am great believer in freedom of speech and with that surely comes the freedom to publish and freedom to promote. I just find it fascinating that when Googling such an amazing business woman I find newspapers using Google to promote their brand.

Are these the same newspapers who claimed “the Internet is just a flash in the pan and will never affect good old fashioned print?”

You have to hand it to the 2 papers mentioned though as they are the only ones utilising this technique.

On the other hand, if you have stumbled upon this site whilst looking to find out more about the great entrepreneur Dame Anita Roddick, the site you will find the most helpful in my opinion is Wikipedia.org.

Firstly it’s important to weigh up where your advert appears in the rankings. Are you going up are you going down? It is imperative that you measure your results.

However, are you aware that Google calculates the number of times you view the adverts? If you do not click on them, after a relatively short time (undisclosed by Google) your advert disappears!

Don’t worry it is still there for the rest of the world to see, however the search engine recognises that you keep ignoring it, so it serves you something else instead.

Very clever, but how do you check your adverts with out affecting the potency of the campaign?

Simple, go to:
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

This allows you to see all the adverts without any interference. This way you get to see everyone, including competitors etc. At the same time, by not clicking on competitors adverts, they are removed from the list as well, so it is easy to get a false sense of who really is competing in your market place.

You might be asking why does it matter to use the tool, and so what if you can’t see them, as long as your customers do?

Rest assured, Google is calculating the potency of your click-throughs and the volume of adverts that are being shown. Literally every view counts and therefore to guarantee best results, use the tool. In my opinion you should use this for natural SEO too, not just “pay per click”.

Please note you can’t click through to the various sites from this page it is merely a read only application.