04 June 2009 | Author: M. Thomson SEO & Affiliate Consultant

Google AdWords favicon could cost you

Over the past few months Google and Yahoo! have been trialling the introduction of a favicon within PPC adverts. A favicon, short for "favourite's icon" is a 16x16 pixel image that can be assigned to any webpage and presented within a browsers address bar.

Did you know that the introduction of the favicon to your website could impact your webpages load time? Everytime a user visits a website their browser (user-agent) makes a number of HTTP requests to download all the components of the page. Components are stylesheets for design, images, scripts etc.

If Google and Yahoo! officially release the introduction of favicons into the wild, millions of PPC advertisers are likely to jump on the bandwagon and add a favicon to their website - thus increasing the amount of HTTP request required to download a webpage.

Favicons are fairly small in terms of file size and will not cause your server or page load times any additional stress, but this tiny aesthetics based addition could earn the search engine giants millions in revenue.

In March 2008, Search Engine Land's news editor Barry Schwartz received a tip that Google had added page load time to its Quality Score algorithm. This means if your landing page loads slowly, you will have a poor load time grade which will negatively affect your AdWords rankings.

Landing page load times are partially determined on the number of HTTP requests your webpage makes. Introduce another HTTP request in the form of a favicon and this minor change could well result in your webpages load time increasing. This can negatively affect your AdWords rankings and cost you, the advertiser, money.

While this may not be immediately visible to advertisers, Google will surely see some increase in their paid search revenue.

While bigmouthmedia believe that increased advertising costs are unlikely to be Google's main intention here, if adopted, this form of change is something that Google must take into consideration. Advising advertisers of the impact of adding favicons within AdWords Help is the best form of transparency Google could offer.

In 2005, Google released some Web Authoring Stats that documented that use of the favicon as a link relationship was widely used already by websites, the second most common usage after stylesheets. Bigmouthmedia, a fan of Google and Yahoo!'s favicon introduction believe a similar sort of testing would likely have been undertaken recently. The results may well be the non-release of the favicon. Alternatively, the poor results could result in Google allowing PPC advertisers to upload a favicon for AdWords, removing the need for an additional HTTP request.

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