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Google +1 Button Performance Review

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Re: Google +1 Button Performance Review

#21

Post by pestaa »

dave1010uk wrote: post #10

The ironic thing about Google's +1, which is meant to get you more clicks on SERPs (as you'll see your friends +1's [1]), is that as Google now use site speed in their ranking algorithm [2]. adding the +1 button to your site would actually make it rank lower. There's another performance review of +1 here [3], which compares it to the Facebook Like button. Steve Souders (who's written books on web performance) has det…

I firmly believe the crawler won't download the plusone library for a few reasons.

- It may not run javascript at all.

- It doesn't need to be checked for malicious content.

- If all else fails, it might have it cached already.

Even if external assets are computed into a site's speed, the overhead is negligible when it comes to search ranking.

Re: Google +1 Button Performance Review

#22

Post by thezilch »

mhansen wrote: post #16
jarin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the comments: "As for your question, we pass in `document` that way to prevent unnecessary scope lookups. We could’ve used `var d = document` inside the IIFE, but that would trigger an additional scope lookup. For `'script'` it doesn’t matter; you could initialize that inside of the IIFE if you want."

It's premature optimization. The extra time taken for a scope lookup is completely insignificant compared to the network costs in loading the script. Perhaps if this was inside a tight inner loop, I could understand, but here it's completely unneccessary.

Is it premature or unnecessary, if the methodology comes natural? Why not get into the habit of reading and writing Javascript with optimization naturally ingrained into the first pass? The optimization(s) may not be immediately necessary here, but there's no harm in practicing these patterns in all facets of language use, unless we want to have a separate conversation whether the patterns are detrimental to syntax.

Re: Google +1 Button Performance Review

#24

Post by dave1010uk »

pestaa wrote: post #21
dave1010uk wrote: post #10

The ironic thing about Google's +1, which is meant to get you more clicks on SERPs (as you'll see your friends +1's [1]), is that as Google now use site speed in their ranking algorithm [2]. adding the +1 button to your site would actually make it rank lower. There's another performance review of +1 here [3], which compares it to the Facebook Like button. Steve Souders (who's written books on web performance) has det…

I firmly believe the crawler won't download the plusone library for a few reasons. - It may not run javascript at all. - It doesn't need to be checked for malicious content. - If all else fails, it might have it cached already. Even if external assets are computed into a site's speed, the overhead is negligible when it comes to search ranking.

Google Instant's previews show the +1 button, so I see no reason why Googlebot wouldn't too. I guess Google wait until window.onload fires instead of just timing the server sending the 1 HTML file. Google could also use data from Google Toolbar users but I doubt they do.

As the article says, even with a primed cache, the +1 code slows down page load. It also said the overhead can be 2 seconds. If you're aiming for fast then that could double your page load time. External assets are very likely to be calculated into a sites speed as they generally take up quite a bit of the page load time.

Of course, no one knows how much of an effect page speed plays in Google's algorithms. My bet, however, is that adding +1 to a fast site could easily make it drop a few places in the SERPs. If your site is already quite slow then an extra 2 seconds may only be a few % slower.

Re: Google +1 Button Performance Review

#25

Post by dave1010uk »

jnhnum1 wrote: post #8
johnsocs wrote: post #7

Google has added the +1 option to all their search requests / results, I'm sure if the performance was such an issue they would of found a way to fix it as it would degrade their page load times, granted I'm sure it's not the same 'exact' code.

The +1 widget on the search results page and other 1st party pages is different than the +1 widget for 3rd party publishers. 3rd parties have to use an iframed widget to prevent click fraud.

Does it prevent click fraud? I wonder if you could place +1 inside a div with style="opacity:0" and position it on top of a link saying "Free cheese" or similar.

Edit: you can. This example [1] has opacity:0.3 so you can still see it. It seems as though it would be trivial for an attacker to put the +1 button over every link on a page. You may even be able to have one tracking the mouse cursor.

[1] http://jsfiddle.net/prJG8/1/

Re: Google +1 Button Performance Review

#26

Post by eridius »

I always see suggestions to put script tags just before , or the inline script that generates a new node. Why does nobody ever suggest using the defer attribute? My understanding is that the defer attribute will do precisely what you want - start loading the script now, but not blocking anything else on the page.

Re: Google +1 Button Performance Review

#27

Post by speleding »

pestaa wrote: post #21
dave1010uk wrote: post #10

The ironic thing about Google's +1, which is meant to get you more clicks on SERPs (as you'll see your friends +1's [1]), is that as Google now use site speed in their ranking algorithm [2]. adding the +1 button to your site would actually make it rank lower. There's another performance review of +1 here [3], which compares it to the Facebook Like button. Steve Souders (who's written books on web performance) has det…

I firmly believe the crawler won't download the plusone library for a few reasons. - It may not run javascript at all. - It doesn't need to be checked for malicious content. - If all else fails, it might have it cached already. Even if external assets are computed into a site's speed, the overhead is negligible when it comes to search ranking.

The page speed that Google uses in it's ranking is (in part?) collected from the Google toolbar installed on local clients. The JS is only cached for 6 minutes. So it seems this will indeed negatively impact your search rankings.

Re: Google +1 Button Performance Review

#28

Post by pestaa »

dave1010uk wrote: post #24
pestaa wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I firmly believe the crawler won't download the plusone library for a few reasons. - It may not run javascript at all. - It doesn't need to be checked for malicious content. - If all else fails, it might have it cached already. Even if external assets are computed into a site's speed, the overhead is negligible when it comes to search ranking.

Google Instant's previews show the +1 button, so I see no reason why Googlebot wouldn't too. I guess Google wait until window.onload fires instead of just timing the server sending the 1 HTML file. Google could also use data from Google Toolbar users but I doubt they do. As the article says, even with a primed cache, the +1 code slows down page load. It also said the overhead can be 2 seconds. If you're aiming for fa…

You're assuming search ranking is primarily based on speed. It might weight the ranking, but relevancy must be still dominant.

I mean, come on. Sites with maps, ads, or even big images can take up more than two seconds. It's not a big deal. Your analytics tracking code slows everything even more.

And it's the same network, the crawler might just go to the next server room.

Re: Google +1 Button Performance Review

#29

Post by speleding »

thezilch wrote: post #2

In short, and as a rule with all scripts, load scripts asynchronously / non-blocking when possible, including Google +1. (function(d, t, g, s){ g = d.createElement(t), s = d.getElementsByTagName(t)[0]; g.async = true; g.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(g, s); })(document, 'script'); Load it as far up your page as possible, as to benefit from the parallelism early on and not han…

If you need the button in any other language than English insert this line in the snippet above:

     g.appendChild(d.createTextNode('{"lang":"fr"}'));
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