http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/09/google_adds_site_speed_to_search_ranking/ http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/your-sites-performance-in-webmaster.html Has your website ranked highly with Google in the past? But does it load slowly? Well, Google doesn't like you anymore. According to Google's new guidelines, the faster your site loads, the higher they will let you rank. Slow loading sites that are heavy with ads and Adobe Flash will lose page rankings. For myself, all my websites have been ruthlessly optimized to load fast and I'm excited to see dramatically improved search positions as of yesterday! Now is the time for all good webmasters to optimize the size and speed of your websites.
I think it is very unclear as to how slow is slow, how fast is fast, and how much either might effect rank. Will a top ranking site like FoxNews be outranked by a quick loading blog? Doubtful. . . so be smart and reduce load-time but don't obsess about it. /*tom*/
That is not what google are saying, and maybe you missed the other 8 threads in the last week about the google announcement ? From http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html The relevance of a page is far more important than speed, always has been always will be. Speed is one of OVER TWO HUNDRED markers google use, but not one of the most important ones. Speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests... if your page takes too long to respond then of course the bot will time out and move on. How long all the connections needed for you page take to RESPOND is NOT the same as how long the page takes to download. The normal Google-bot downloads the HTML of a page, not each graphic, flash file etc. those files are downloaded via google media bot etc, but it is the normal google bot that indexes the web and results in you appearing in serps. IF you have lots of external scripts that are slow to respond, that need lots of DNS look-ups etc it might not look too good for you, else don't worry. If all you want is super fast then just have text files, but don't expect too many readers
@vagrant, In case you missed it, page speed is just ONE criteria. Of COURSE it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page! How could it??? A fast-loading page won't rank for keywords not relevant to the page, will it? (Duh!) Yes, Goggle claims that fewer than 1% of search queries are affected. That means it will affect *only* 3 million search queries... but this isn't a Yes/No issue here. I can tell you from personal experimentation that a faster loading website most definitely WILL rank higher. I'm guessing that the webmasters that will be most affected by this will be the webmasters that will attempt to rationalize and ignore Google's warning.
no i did not miss it if you read what i said ... "Speed is one of OVER TWO HUNDRED markers google use, but not one of the most important ones." I am not the only one that thinks many are over reacting and getting the wrong end of the stick with this... have a read of Is Load-Speed the Ultimate Google Ranking Factor? at sitepronews If you want, remove all Analytics and AdSense scripts because they have slow performance will now obviously ruin your website’s performance ? I doubt that the BBC News site will remove all their flash files, nor will they have any need to. Spammy sites with 20 different 'i-frame' adverts, all needing different DNS lookup's to fetch, might find they rank lower tho.... however that is more a response time problem ... rather than page speed problem.
I think speed is NOT the factor but one of the factor in getting high rankings and PR. This was already implemented by google last year, its coming now in the news because you can actually see the results.
Hey that's pretty nice information. Thanks for this. We can now change our strategies according to these new rules.