Read this new post from Google: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
Especially this part I like: As one of my most important website has a bad score in Webmaster Tools. I tried anything to speed it up but unfortenately the average connection speed in my targeted country is still way lower than average.
Saw that earlier and I have to say that I'm pleased. The reason for this is simple, there's still a lot of outdated sites on the net and this is just another way to get away from them. It also is bad news for a lot of hosting services which prided themselves on maxing their bandwidth and not doing anything to correct it because their too greedy. So hopefully this will help out the end user, rather.
Ha, might have to work on my website a little then, thinking about getting a CDN, that way my static files will load faster for all.
I think this was already taken into consideration in this last google update. If I am not wrong I heard this news end of last December 2009. I already implemented it for my site and blog couple of months back
It only means a new ranking factor for me and I don't think it would lead to a big change in SEO arena for there are many outside factors in judging your sites' speed. Thanks,
I think, using site speed to help determine SERP is a bad idea. SERP should be based on relativity to the search phrase not how fast the site loads. If someone is looking for an answer on Google, I don't think they would mind if the site with that answer takes 3 seconds longer to load.
godaddy hosting isn't necessarily the cause. If you are using any 3rd party scripting, or your images aren't optimized, this could be the cause
I agree with you. Its very much a double edged sword in a way because there's a lot of sites which have horrible hosting (no fault of their own) so it can definitely hurt them. However, I think that this is direct slap in the face to hosting companies who arn't doing a good job, and an indirect slap at their clients. Overall, I just hope that things work out best for the end user
Site speed is part of new Google Caffeine which still not fully available yet and running in one DC only. Site speed is one factor out of other 200 which impacting SERP. Content and relevance are the most important. Don't expect if your website will be super fast, it will beat all others (from SERP point of view). From other hand, if your site is very slow, the number of returning visitors will be small. Also Google will crawl less. Try to keep your site speed with user friendly limits.
Too much is being made of this. Google says it will affect less than 1% of searches and relevance is still king. Like someone said, your superfast site will not win out on that alone. And forget about them devaluing wikipedia, amazon, etc. They are too big to fail, to coin a phrase. Stephen C