Google Search Share Declines…Again
For the fourth straight month, Google’s search market share has fallen, Hitwise reports. Google still holds over 70% of the total search market but according to Hitwise, both Yahoo and Ask.com made gains in search while Google and Bing fell. Overall, Google is still the dominant player in search with easily more market than the rest of the competitors combined.

Site Load Speed Now a Ranking Factor
As mentioned previously, Google has been looking at using site load speed as a potential ranking factor (or penalty for slow loading sites). It appears that site load speed as a ranking factor on Google is already in place. According to Google, sites should still focus primarily on relevancy; however, site load speed does affect the user experience which is often at the core of Google’s thought process when it comes to generating results.

Several of the changes that ArtFire has made in the past few months have prepared us for this update. Both the update to the new forums and the updated MyArtFire control panel has increased site load speed overall, even on pages with numerous images. Overall the average page on ArtFire takes less than 2 seconds to load. While this puts us in the top 75% of websites, we are still working to make changes that increase the speed at which users can access the site.

You may want to take this time to review your own studio’s page load speed. We’ve seen a fairly wide discrepancy in the amount of time studios take to load from under 1 second to more than 5 seconds. Some factors that can affect page load speed in studios are the number of and type of widgets a seller is using. You are free to use widgets in your studio, however, if you find that your studio “hangs” on loading your widgets it may be more beneficial to use alternate or no widgets if you’re concerned about the page load time.