Google is running a new test in Indonesia that will see users served a “lighter” version of your webpages when users are visiting your site from a slow mobile connection.  The “field test” will start running in two weeks and will serve those visiting sites on a connection that is 2G or slower.

This test will load a webpage 4 times faster than the original version of the page, using 80% fewer bytes.  And Google discovered that when they were able to serve this lighter version that traffic increased to those pages by 50%.

Google has also released a tool to allow webmasters to see how the lighter version of their webpages will be served to these users.  If you are logged into your Google Webmaster Tools account, you can submit your URL here. Here is the optimized version of the homepage for The SEM Post.

Pretty ugly, but will serve much faster to those users.

Google is also giving webmasters a way to opt-out of this feature simply by adding “Cache-Control: no-transform” in the headers.  However, those users on a slower connection will see those results labeled in a way to alert users that they may take longer to load.

Google will only serve up to 3 ads to those users with slower speeds that are getting optimized pages.  The first three in the code are the ones displayed.

This speed boost will also remove the ability to serve some types of ads to those users.  Right now, Google is supporting AdSense, Sovrn and Zedo, as well as DoubleClick for Publishers with AdSense as the gall back network, but are working to add more ad networks.

I imagine we will also see