The last week or so I’ve been looking at Google’s Webmaster Tools to try and tidy up errors, old pages, meta issues etc, but one thing that really caught my eye was the data on site performance. On one hand one of our subdomains does really well, but on the other our average for the www version of Loquax was incredibly poor. So poor in fact that if site performance became a factor in rankings we’d be somewhere at the bottom.

The cause of this isn’t the fact that our servers are covered in treacle and managed by a bunch of snails who are incredibly relaxed thanks to the benefits of illegal grass type products, but because of our redirect page. We use a redirect link (goto.htm), with php header code, to mask our urls and redirect them. We never used to do this, but after having large swathes of the site “borrowed” on a regular basis it became a necessity.

Clicking on one of our redirects usually results in the outbound link loading in – so why Google was assigning an average over 7 seconds to our redirect goto.htm was a bit of a mystery. Could it be including the time to load the redirect as an indicator of our server response? Or can Google’s site performance data not take into account/identify a php redirect? For the first time I tried the support forum and made a couple of changes including identifying the redirect.

One additional change made since then has involved what happens when the goto.htm id is no longer used. We don’t want our users clicking through to dead sites, so when an id is not in use we redirect to a “sorry not available” holding page. Within that page was some database code that really wasn’t needed. My theory is that if Google is hitting a lot of our old redirects it’s just landing on the “sorry” page multiple times – resulting in multiple database calls and lots of confusion.

So, to counter this, we’ve put a robots.txt exclusion on the “sorry” page (it was already noindex) and, so far, it seems our average speed for goto.htm is now dropping. Hopefully the average will continue to drop and the changes made won’t effect anything else.

According to Blogstorm, site speed is not yet a factor in The UK yet. But, if you do use redirects it might be worth looking at your Site Performance just in case your speed average is being skewed.

And, if you have any ideas/suggestions as to the cause of why Google sees php header redirects as slow then please post below!