It’s Official: Google Now Counts Site Speed As A Ranking Factor

[mikemac1]

Well, this has been mentioned many times before as being an important factor in rankings and now it's official...

Google has kept a promise it made last year: Site speed is now a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, and is already in place for U.S. searchers. But Google also cautions web site owners not to sacrifice relevance in the name of faster web pages, and even says this new ranking factor will impact very few queries.

A little more on how Google measures site speed:

two primary ways Google will measure page speed:

How a page responds to Googlebot
Load time as measured by the Google Toolbar

BTW, here's the article I found this at: It’s Official: Google Now Counts Site Speed As A Ranking Factor

[Steve Crooks]

If you have a webmaster tools account and you use Firefox, there is a great little addon that can work with your webmaster tools account to measure site speed and flag up any problems. Take a look here..

Site performance - Webmaster Tools Help

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by michael-mac

being an important factor in rankings

this new ranking factor will impact very few queries.

YouTube - Sesame Street: Cookie Monster's Sorting...

[paulgl]

You should quote the rest:

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.

If more people concentrated on page relevance, the rest is moot.

One can only hope google takes its own advice and speeds up its javascripts, etc.
Maybe they have an algorithm to ignore their own script speed.

But maybe if the masses jump on board, we can clean the web up from self loading
videos, flash, sound, bad javascripts, etc.

Paul

[Shaun Lee]

I always thought the speed of a webpage loading is one of the ranking factors. However, like what paulgl said, it's not going to be a very important factor. It's still better to focus on other proven, crucial elements.

-Shaun