Hello, this is John Locke, and today's question comes to us from Reddit. Now,
judging by their question, I'm guessing that their site is probably under two
years old, on the newer side, not a long term site. But I thought this
question was really interesting, so I wanted to answer it and give my two
cents on it. This particular person, their question was,
"Is PageSpeed Insights BS?" Page Speed Insights is Google's tool for measuring PageSpeed.
They give you a numerical score for mobile, and then also for
desktop. This is also known as Lighthouse. Now it's rebranded.
Basically, you run a URL through the tool, it will give you a score, and then some
recommendations of what to do. Why this person was asking this question is, they
said, "We ran our site through Google PageSpeed Insights, and initially our
mobile score was 1, and our desktop score was 10 -- pretty bad. We worked
with our developer, and we got the scores up to 30 on mobile and 50 on desktop,
respectively." But what happened to their site is, they experienced a downturn in
traffic. They said that they had a 90 percent downturn in traffic during the
last few weeks. The reason why they're saying, "Is Page Speed Insights BS?" is because
they were looking at Ahrefs and they said that their Domain Rank score went
from the twenty-two-millionth best web site to the sixteen-millionth best web site (according to Ahrefs Domain Rank).
Basically their rank of all the domains in the world, went from 22
million to 16 million. They improved their
Page Speed Insights score, but yet they were dropping in actual Google traffic. An
example that they cited, they ran some very famous sites through the
Google PageSpeed Insights, and they said the New York Times had a score of 31.
Apple had a score of 50. Twitter had a score of 70. Google had a score of 70.
To them, Page Speed Insights seems like BS, because this tool says anything below 90 is "not good".
They said, "We improved our score, and yet we lost rankings." Here's what I think.
Without knowing what category your site is in, and without knowing any additional
details. A couple things to unpack. Google said a long time ago that they
want to rank big brands. If you've been watching our videos from last week,
you'll see that we touched on this a few times.
They said this way back in 2008. They've really been increasing the heat
on that in the last year or so, where big brands like the New York Times,
Twitter, Apple, HuffPo are over here, and all the rest of sites that are
up and coming are over here. To put it bluntly, you're not going to
get the same type of treatment as these large brands are going to get. I
think it's good that you increased the speed of your site, and you
increased your speed score in Google. (That helps.) But one of the biggest things that they're
going to look at is Time To First Byte (TTFB), and the actual time it takes to load
what they call the "above-the-fold" content. That is anything that's visible when
you first load the screen. There's things that you can do like
inlining CSS. Perhaps the biggest thing that you can do is get on good hosting. However, I
don't think that's the
issue (with your rankings). You also mentioned that you're Ahrefs Domain Ranking score went up. That usually means that
you're building links. Because Ahrefs, SEM Rush, Moz, and Majestic -- all
of them have different factors. Moz
might call it the Domain Rank. Ahrefs might call it URL Rank or Domain
Authority or Domain Rank. I believe Majestic calls it Trust Flow
and Citation Flow. All these basically boil down to one thing. Are you getting
more links? Are the links that you're getting likely to raise your search
ranking? Most of these tools rework their formulas every so
often, to try and figure out if your link profile actually lines up with what's
ranking (in Google). A lot of people have high Domain Authority ranking sites,
and they're actually filled with a lot of PBN links (Private Blog Network links),
a lot of black hat SEO links. So it's not really a true reading all the time. That
said, I don't think that that's your issue either. As many of you know,
Google updates their algorithm many times during the year. In the last
year and a half, they've really been trying to dial up the the machine
learning part of their algorithm, which is called RankBrain. Essentially,
Google wants to have their AI eventually pick results out out of the search
rankings, and rank them in a way (that a human would), so the sites that a human being would most
likely choose are ranked the highest. They probably still have a ways to go with
that. I don't think that their AI is as intelligent or is intuitive as a human
being. It's not going to choose the same thing. But they're trying to move it in
that direction.They are making several changes to their ranking
algorithm on a daily basis, and a lot of people suspect that they are running
experiments like split testing in real-time. If you follow some of the
SEO consultants out there, if you follow some of the tools that try that
track ranking volatility -- meaning how often the ranking changes on a daily or
weekly basis -- many of them will tell you there are a lot of fluctuations
going on. It appears that there are a lot of minor updates going on over the
last few months. A lot of this goes back to August and September of
2018, with the so-called Medic update, when everybody was saying it's all about
E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness). But a lot of it
boils down to, they're doing a lot of updates in real-time every few weeks.
What I think that you got hit with was a Content quality or a Site quality update.
If you look at the SEO consultants that track this sort of thing,
those who keep track of the minor updates that don't have names, there seem
to be a lot of these going on recently. Many of sites that that we've worked with
over the last few months, that we've worked with to improve not only the UX
and the site quality, but also the content quality, seem to have been
getting positive bumps up without a lot of link building involved. I believe that
what you are seeing is a content quality issue. I don't
know what particular vertical or category you're in. But my advice to
you would be, take a look at your content. Make sure that it is thoroughly
researched, that it is appealing, that it's easy to read, that it's credible, and
cites sources. Basically, it should answer any questions that the readers might have.
That would be my best suggestion to you. Create good content. The other thing I
would look at is, look at your site quality from an objective standpoint, and
make sure that your site is as good as it could be. That's what I think is
happening to you. It's not about page speed at all. Speed is a factor, but it's a small
factor. When you compare it to content, (and I don't believe that its links
that's hurting you) -- I think it's a content thing -- from what you're telling
me. That's my opinion...man. My name is John Locke. My business is Lockedown
Design and SEO. We help manufacturing companies get more Requests for Quotes.
If you have an SEO question, leave it in the comments below, and we'll answer it in a
future video for you. We're putting out videos every week, so there's no
reason not to subscribe. Until next time, peace.