http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html Google will now put you higher if you have a nice speed. Try to optimize your site so it loads as fast as possible!
Thanks for the clarification- and makes sense too; Google isn't going to go ahead and add some new factor that's going to allow people to game their rankings =)
I see it affecting only those sites with super slow load times. At least I hope so, lol. Anybody else go to another forum or site for example and you have to wait 30 to 60 seconds or longer just for the login page to load? Then you have to wait that long for the next page to load, etc.
We built a new SERP checker that uses the Google API and is on the Amazon Web Cloud for ultra-fast speed. Do a benchmark using the tool then create A/B testing for a few pages where you can optimize the page speed. Then run the test again. It's all free and brand new. Link in Sig because they will probably remove the link if I try to actually share it with you. Have fun.
At first I was concerned. Because my site is rather rich with images. Not overloaded, but I have plenty. My home page is like just under 200k altogether. What I did was enter keywords for my niche, to see what websites were listed near the top. When I saw one or two sites at 300k or more for the home page, I figured I had to be safe. But I did trim about 30k off my home page just to lean to the safe side a bit more.
1% is a pretty small number and the article or blog post I read says it is only apparent in google . com not other google country sites. It didn't say if other google country searches would be affected in the future or if they intended to bump the 1% up. It is something to watch but nothing to loose sleep over. I am kind of leaning towards liking the idea.