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Google: Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010

Algorithm Change Would Make Slow Sites Rank Lower

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By · December 23, 2009 · 169 Comments

Over the course of 2009, a consistent theme that Google has been involved with is that of speed. In announcement after announcement, Google has talked about the importance of speed on the web, and how the company wants to do everything it can to make the web a faster place. Has it occurred to you that how fast your page loads may have a direct effect on how your site ranks in Google?

Don’t worry, it hasn’t had an impact…yet. In an interview with WebProNews, Google’s Matt Cutts told us that speed may soon be a ranking factor.

"Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast," says Cutts. "It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much."

>> Site speed ranking comments starts at the 02:35 point in the video…

"I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?’" he says.

I would say that based on Matt’s comments it is probably fair to assume that Google will indeed begin taking page speed into consideration as a ranking factor, although he doesn’t come right out and say that they definitely will. That said, making your site faster is going to benefit your users and possibly your sales anyway, so you might as well start optimizing it for speed anyway. Then if Google really does start using this as a ranking factor, you will have a head start on boosting your rankings.

Google has generally been pretty good at providing webmasters with tools they can use to help optimize their sites and potentially boost rankings and conversions. Google recently announced a Site Speed site, which provides webmasters with even more resources specifically aimed at speeding up their pages. Some of these, such as Page Speed and Closure tools come from Google itself. But there are a number of tools Google points you to from other developers as well.

If you’re serious about wanting your site to perform better in search engines, and you haven’t given much thought to load times and such, it’s time to readjust your way of thinking. Caffeine increases the speed at which Google can index content. Wouldn’t it make sense if your site helped the process along?

Have you given much thought to site speed? Is your site up to snuff? Discuss here.

Related Articles:

> Google Wants the Web to Function Like a Magazine

> Google Provides Tool for Speeding Up Web Pages

> Google Lets Businesses Speed Up Videos

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There are 169 Comments. Add Yours.
  1. cormac
    Reply

    This is ridiculous, when people search their interest is in the content of a site, not the speed.

    • Chris Crum
      Reply

      I agree that their interest is in the content of the site, but I think people also want that content to load quickly. I think if two sites are relevant to my search and one of them is quicker than the other one, I would prefer the quick one.

      • I think this basically is going to have a lot of publishers also paging their content into multiple pages if they cannot afford a better server, faster connection, etc.

        It would be the easiest way to load at least some of the content faster.

        This might also force a lot of smaller publishers to go more text and less graphic.
        That can mean media rich ads and media rich content might be put aside or they’ll face less traffic overall from Google.

        • Guest
          Reply

          >This might also force a lot of smaller publishers to go more text and less graphic.

          there is an unclear defintion of speed. if the page is cached by the browser, as it usually is,
          only the initial load will be a drag. subsequent loadings will be sigificantly faster.

          so what is googles definition of speed then ?
          will sites be penalised for good graphics, which loads a little slow initially ?
          will inter-networking hiccups be considered site hiccups ?
          will distances play a role ?
          will all sites in Katmandu say, be automatically labelled “slow” ?
          will water on the moon mean humans can hope to catch a cuppa Cappuccino on the way to Mars ?

          silly indeed.

    • That’s only half true.

      If I search for a very specific thing, then content is what I prioritize, but if I search a general topic then speed is definitely part of the search.

      There are plenty of sites with excellent content for broader searches and speed is definitely a reason for me to pick one site over the other. I would love for it to be incorporated into a search – especially if it meant sites with less ads and superfluous javascript that just lags and lags and (pause for loading) lags.

  2. I can see why Google is considering adding speed to page rank. Who wants to wait around for a site that takes twenty minutes to load. While content is king, if the page takes too long to load no one is going to see the content.

  3. Guest
    Reply

    I think this is a bad idea for two reason.
    Google would be using their influence to define the Internet in a space that is not related to quality sites. Speed is important in it’s own right but it’s not apart of relevance. It’s getting harder to find good information within google’s search results with all the sites that have come up just to profit from google adsense and provide no great value to the reader.

  4. Guest
    Reply

    What do you think that the faster a page loads the sooner a searcher can leave that site and return to the google page and hopefully click on more sponsored links.

  5. Well, this is what i expect for many years. Thankfully, they finally messed up with the speed. Google should come open and tell how will they rank for speed.

  6. I don’t like this idea. It’s already in a website owner’s interest for a site to be fast loading, to increase page views and sales / advertising conversions. But if Google makes this a factor in Page Rank it would stifle new competition by favouring wealthier organisations with better servers. Either that or plain text files will go to the top :)

  7. I agree. I think if the site is responding in a reasonable amount of time it should have no effect on ranking. This would lead to issues as to when Google should crawl my site. My response time is slower during heavy traffic periods, but if Google comes by then, I would get a poorer score than I would if I had no traffic, say, 4am.

    Bottom line, if they are ranking based on the quality of the website, this, along with many other things should be left out. If they want to create a new product called ‘speed search’ to find the fastest sites on the web, that would be fine, but keep it out of the regular search.

  8. Guest
    Reply

    If I go into a restaurant and order a steak, I’d be annoyed if the server brought me a burger, and then told me it’s OK because it’s relevant – they’re both beef after all – but the burger was ready first. This is kind of the same thing. It all depends on at what point speed trumps relevance, but right now, I’m not a fan of this change.

    • Guest
      Reply

      That is the problem. Google values hamburger over steak and believes that the rest of us do too. How are people to know the difference if they are never shown where the fillet mignon is? They can’t even find it. While a fast Google search is mandatory and sites that are not updated, old html, slow and sloggy should come up lower than updated, trafficked sites, setting a limit on load time that applies straight across the board for all types of sites is just ludicrous.

  9. Absolutely agree with you Chris. I cannot see how it is ridiculous to say that a slow web site won’t have a negative effect on its desirability. I for one get irritated with slow loading sites, and definitely have a lower user experience than if it was faster. Of course people don’t visit a site because it is fast, without any regard to content. The content is what attracts them, but if it is painfully slow, then don’t expect to keep them for long – at least no longer than it takes to load up the pages when hitting the ‘back’ button!

  10. Oh My God, my sites rank well at moment but are quite slow, hope this isnt about to change

  11. Guest
    Reply

    What about sites that are popular because of their content that includes photos and video – multimedia and intricate, interactive user valuable features? They are going to rank lower than a plain site with a bit of text containing a ton of adsense links and garbage – made only for the purpose of clicks and affiliate bucks? That’s what many Google changes created in the past. A whole slew of irrelevant sites ranking higher than the sites people really should have been served with first.

  12. Don’t worry guys, this is not going affect things so much as it would be one of the factors google used to rank your sites. So what if there is an addition of another drop to the sea of search ranking algorithms . I do not care ;-)

  13. Chris Crum
    Reply

    Google frequently discusses how they want to provides users with the best experience possible, and the most relevant results. I don’t think Google is going to sacrifice relevancy to the extent that users are not going to find what they’re looking for because it loads quicker. We can only speculate at how this would shake out at this point (if it even does for sure), but I would guess it would come down to if there were more than one site with the exact same amount of relevancy to the query, than the faster one would win.

    I don’t think it’s going to be burgers and steaks as one commenter suggests, but steaks and faster steaks. You may not want the burger over the steak because it’s faster, but wouldn’t you want the steak that came out faster because the other steak was still frozen?

  14. Sorry but this is going too far now, meaning those of us on a budget will be lost in the rankings where the big boys will race past. Google are fast becoming the new Microsoft in calling the shots, granted google is their baby but when most of the world use it they then have the power to make or break someone and the decisions they make should be fair and just, not simply a whim or wish list. They are fast running the risk of webmasters abandoning them in favour for other search engines, god knows I’ve sweated blood and tears trying to impress google yet they seem to favour sites which infest peoples computers with spyware and adware simply because they do a better job of selling their ads!. If I could curse here I would, yet I fear my comments would be edited so I’ll finish with my apt title, LOAD OF BALLS GOOGLE, LOAD OF BALLS!

  15. our website http://www.oilandgaspeople.com is very fast compared to our competitors so I am all for this. We develop around speed to offer our users the best possible experience when using the site. its a lot of work and effort to ensure that every page loads quickly so about time it was rewarded!

  16. NAX
    Reply

    In that case, we will build another search engine :)

  17. The web should be fast. If I click through to a site that takes a long time to load then I will just hit back and move on. With the new Google update, it will save me and lots of people lots of time.

    Back in the days of dial-up and slow DSL, long load times were common and people were patient, but today with connection speeds reaching 1gigabit per second, there is no reason for a slow load time.

  18. This is silly and not do-able for retail sites that need good pictures of their products. You can only optimize images so much. What will Google think of next.

    • It is totally possible. My company built a retail site that loads very quickly and has high quality pictures. Its all in how you build your site and the tools that you use.

  19. We need information at the speed of thought and that’s what is the web all about. Accuracy and Speed.

    So, it’s our next challenge to create websites that load faster. Lighter websites rank higher.

    Thanks
    Shank

  20. I agree that the speed of loading is an influential factor in determining whether people actually stay on a site long enough to read the content. If a page is bloated with graphics and taking a long time to load, most people are going to click to the next site unless they have a specific reason to view that one.

    It highlights the importance of not only making sure that the number of images on a page is kept within reason, but also that they are compressed and not resized in HTML.

  21. What was funny I was just talking to a customer about thier code to text ratio and how it effects the speed of his website and how important it is to more text than code(ratio).
    without going into how google reads a webpage, My own use has been when analizing a customers page is to first check coding and fix errors, and then see if we can optimize the page for all browsers and make it load faster.

    Here is a good one Google has X amount of servers right?
    Well if pages that are optimized to load faster and are code cleanly.
    Times that by thier bandwidth and eventually with them spending $$ on buying companies.

    By spreading this word of page speed its actually a subcontious call to lower thier costs on the bottom line.

    maybe i’m wrong but thinkabout it moneywise..

  22. As a webmaster/web designer/graphic designer/blogger I have to agree with google in the fact that page speed should be a factor in ranking. I usually spend 1-2 hours a day reading technology blogs and articles just to keep up with the latest trends and issues in the industry. I myself have little patience for green bars and really appreciate spending my time reading and learning, not waiting. In all the pages I build, I have always optimized my page (especially media) to keep page loading time to a bare minimum.

    The only problem I may have with this idea is that text rich pages with no interesting content may take precedence over more valuable counterparts. I think that there should be a certain page size cap (KB), where if web sites stay below that cap per page, they will not be penalized in their ranking. After all, isn’t this “page speed ranking” being set to keep users from being bogged down with slow pages, not to see who is the fastest?

  23. sm
    Reply

    content as well as speed both are important.
    both should get the bonus.

  24. For years we’ve been talking about the 15s deadline for a web page to load or the visitor leave for more fertile pastures. The speed should count for something and it’s in the best ineterest of the internet. As applications are becoming more browser-centric and with the upcoming Chrome OS there is no doubt web pages speed need to be taking into consideration just like on-page SEO is now.

    The web is about content as much as how fast the information can be accessed. In the end we’ll all benefit from a faster web. In a scale of 1 to 10 the speed should rank somewhere between 2 and 3.

  25. I designed my site for speed from the beginning. Small images were used and I didn’t go for any flash. Just a basic web site. Lately, however, I’ve been reading how Google loves images. Supposedly big good quality images at that. If I was to take that advice my site would be terribly slow. It would also be against what I previously learned from Google about using smaller and fewer images. It even got me to thinking maybe they feel there are enough high speed users to go for it now.

    What about blogger? Many of those pages have so many images an load terribly slow. A lot of the time my browser hangs for a while and I can’t do anything. I do wish Google would make up their mind or mine :) .

    • pookie
      Reply

      and learn how to make image files smaller without losing quality.
      Images are good.
      Bloated image files that take forever to load are not – same goes with about everything else.

  26. This smells like another one of Google’s tricks to get us to use their software to create websites.

    If their software is faster at rendering the pages, then wouldn’t the obvious choice then be to use Google software to create your website because you knew it would favor better in search results?

    Foxweb is blazing fast, and our servers for our websites are blazing fast, and they are on a 1gps connection, so I expect our websites to jump ahead of the game based on what Google is planning ahead.

    I think it’s unfair to many small publishers who can’t afford fancy software or programmers, or even a really fast connection, but since Google has left us no choice but to roll with the punches, I’m in favor of anything that would give our sites the edge they need.

  27. Who would have thought this would play any role in search results. What will they think of next? Maybe their running out of things to keep the SEO people jumping. What will happen next is the birth of a whole new industry…. SSO Speed Site Optimization. If the term catches on, I would like to take the credit.

  28. I for one care abut the content, yes, HOWEVER, if a site does not load fast enough for me within a few seconds, then I click the back button right away and move on to the next page on the google search result.
    Content is very relevant, but if I’m looking for something, is because I want it now, right now, and I don’t want to wait for the site to load.

    So I agree if google decided to count “speed” as one of the factors for their search engine ranking, I think it’s really awesome and will benefit the users. It will also force developers not to write s***ty code that makes the site weight too much and load slower.. so from me? two thumbs up on this idea.

  29. Guest
    Reply

    Most users today want everything and they want it yesterday. It does not matter if you have authoritative content or not, if you load slow, I am willing to bet the user is going to take their chances on another page that loads faster, even if it isn’t the best content.

  30. Hey folks,

    Wouldn’t this be an incentive to not have ads and banners on a site? Seems counter to the idea of people paying more to advertise on high ranking sites to me.

    Cheers

    Carl

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