Website loading speed a factor for search engines?

Not long ago, Google's Matt Cutts suggested that page speed may soon become a ranking factor in the world's most popular search engine. Speed has been a consistent theme with Google for over a year, due to various tools at web developers' disposal, namely their own web browser, Google Chrome. It has become quite evident that Google places a great deal of importance on speeding up the internet experience. With that in mind, it's not hard to see why Cutts' suggestion could soon become a reality. Google has always maintained that it is trying to deliver the best user experience, and by delivering results that load quickly will allow users should get just that.

While many website developers are embracing the notion of speed as a ranking factor as a welcome change, there are some who take issue with it for a variety of reasons, such as:

• How (or If) a site will be found in a search.
• Political issue between countries of a different stage in technological advancement.
• Will restrictions be placed on media-rich content like videos and Flash?
• Monopolies may develop, allowing rich corporations to squeeze out smaller competitors.

Despite how you feel about the possibility of Google using page speed as a ranking factor, it is probably going to happen. Consider Google's recently introduced real-time results. The quicker Google can crawl the web, the quicker your website will appear in a search (if constructed correctly!).

As far as speeding up your site in general, Google has its own tips for webmasters. It has offered a site performance improvement using its Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools has a Site Performance feature, which shows you a performance overview graph. This looks at the aggregated speed numbers for your site, based on the pages that were most frequently accessed by visitors who use the Google Toolbar and have the PageRank feature activated.

Google says, "By using data from Google Toolbar users, you don't have to worry about us testing your site from a location that your users do not use. For example, if your site is in Germany and all your users are in Germany, the chart will reflect the load time as seen in Germany. Similarly, if your users mostly use dial-up connections (or high-speed broadband), that would be reflected in these numbers as well. If only a few visitors of your site use the Google Toolbar, we may not be able to show this data in Webmaster Tools."

You can read more about the future plans of this from Web Pro News here:
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/09/google-stresses-speed-yet-again-with-new-tool

Enjoy,

Seanie.

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