Will Site Speed Kill Off QuantCast?

I wonder if Google's new "Site speed" signal has started the demise of QuantCast.

Last April, Google announced that it is using the load time of our webpages as another signal towards its webpage ranking algorithm....

But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.

In thinking about this, this is going to cause the demise of many plugins, javascripts, and widgets that we add to our websites.

For example, most of my websites have two stat trackers...

• A detailed stats tracker just for me to evaluate, usually StatCounter or Google Analytics,


• And a public stats tracker, for advertisers to evaluate, QuantCast.

But now I'm wondering if I should just jettison the QuantCast code from my pages. Albeit, their code doesn't add that much more time to the loading, only another 370 bytes, and still another fraction of a second for someone's browser to execute that code.

But as it is, Google thinks that 3 seconds to load a page is "slow", whereas 1.5 seconds is average.

Below is a graph that I copied from Google Webmaster Tools showing my website, Interment.net, with an average load time of 3.2 seconds...


So if 1.5 seconds is the difference between getting a Google penalty and not, then that makes all non-critical scripts, including QuantCast, look like unwanted baggage.

While Matt Cutts explained that site speed plays a smaller role in determining your overall rankings, I can't help but wonder the fate of such companies like QuantCast who make a business out of taking up additional space on our webpages. Companies that squeeze out a living offering cute widgets and gadgets on our blogs may soon find themselves going out of business due to this new SEO signal.

As for my goal of wanting to provide advertisers with metrics they can see for themselves, it turns out that Google already offers a similar service, Doubleclick AdPlanner. It basically uses data from Google Analytics, so since I already have the Analytics code in my pages, it makes the QuantCast code duplicative.  ✓