Google has ended months of speculation by officially announcing that site speed is now being used as a ranking factor.
For some time now Google has been promoting a faster web. Going back to May ’09 Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the attendees at Google’s I/O developer event about wanting to speed up the web. This was soon followed by a Google blog post introducing the Page Speed application. In the same month Google published the following blog post which focused on how Google has strived to make its services faster and has identified a variety of performance best practices, which Google shares with the web community at http://code.google.com/speed/.
So, later in the year it wasn’t a total surprise when Google’s Matt Cutts mentioned in an interview with Web Pro News that site speed would be an important factor for SEO in 2010. This was followed by the addition of an experimental feature to Google Webmaster Tools called Site Performance in December 2009.
In the announcement on its blog post, Google has provided a list of applications that can help in evaluating the speed of a website as well as a link to its own Web Performance Best Practices page.
Google does, however, say that as a signal it does not carry as much weight as the relevance of the page and that "…the signal it only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point". Google also say that it only affects fewer than 1% of search queries, and that it was launched a few weeks back. So if you haven’t seen any changes to your rankings, the site speed change probably didn’t impact your site.
Tags: best practice, Google, ranking factors, search, SEO, serps, site speed