Search engine ranking depends on many factors. What Google officially declared is the web page load timing. The time a website takes to open its page is a factor that attracts or detracts the visitor. People find it time wasting and get stressed when pages are not opened as quickly as possible. It’s for the first time that Google has announced the ranking algorithms in a more open way. How SEOs and the owners of websites will see it. Click the below link to read few points toward understanding this news. http://www.seogp.com/blog/google/google-included-site-speed-in-its-ranking-algorithms/
Matt Cutts has been saying on his blog for awhile now that there are people at Google who have been making a push for load time to become a factor in SERPs and I'm glad to see that Google is coming out publicly with some of this information. Transparency is something left to be desired in there algorithmic changes.
Excellent find, this also means use of flashy heavy templates needs to be avoided, does this also mean plain html sites will get more preference and this opens another pandora's box, plain html pages have no user interactivity abilities, so this means bounce rates will increase, which also means again you are losing out on some factor or the other, phew....how to find a mid way in all this
One thing to remember, don't focus solely on just improving your site's load speed. It's just one of 200 factors Google uses for determine a website's rank in it's index.
Are Google giving this a big priority in the near future or is it just a minor priority,i am lucky that i have most of our sites on a dedicated server with 8 gig of memory so that should not be a issue but i do have a smaller server with less memory and i am wondering if those sites will held back.
It's only supposed to affect <1% of websites. The overall effect is supposed to be minimal anyways, so I wouldn't worry about it.