Site Speed Now a Factor in Google Rankings

It’s official — Google is now beginning to rank websites by speed very minutely, reports Amit Singhal of Google’s search quality team in a blog post published on Friday. With research showing that users spend less time on websites that take forever and one day to load, the inclusion of the factor into Google’s ultra-complex search algorithm is sure to assist the many users of Google.

Singhal writes:

“While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.”

Website owners are encouraged to do all they possibly can to speed up the performance of their website, though Google advises that it’s probably not a good idea to sacrifice content in the name of doing so. Content is still king, and relevance is the single most import factor in Google’s ranking algorithm.

[ via Google Webmaster Central ]