Since Google has released the Site Performance reports in Webmaster Tools and page speed is Google's 2010 ranking factor promise, Webmasters have been somewhat obsessed with speeding up their sites.
Webmasters are concerned with scripts they do not control. Such as Google Analytics slowing down their page load times. In fact, we just reported that Google is going to add a trustworthy indicator to site performance reports in order to alleviate some of the webmaster stress over speed performance.
Now, we see reports that Google AdSense is slow. But instead of Google just telling us not to worry about it, which they have told us for this. Google is actually going to speed up the AdSense load time specifically for GoogleBot.
AdSenseAdvisor said in a WebmasterWorld thread two things. The first was not to worry about it and the second was that they will be improving the speed of AdSense specifically for GoogleBot.
Let me quote AdSense Advisor:
(1) "The Page Speed suggestions on Webmaster Tools are based on the content served to Googlebot. In this case, AdSense serves the javascript uncompressed to Googlebot, but does actually compress it with gzip for regular users. So, the AdSense javascript is already optimized for your site's users. AdSense works very hard at making sure that it doesn't slow down the page load."
(2) "We are changing AdSense to send compressed content to our Googlebot so that the recommendation in Webmaster Central accurately reflects how AdSense works."
Now some may ask if this is a form of serving different content to GoogleBot versus a human - i.e. cloaking. I don't think this falls under that.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
