The speed theme continues as Google has introduced a new image format from the web, aimed at speeding up load times. It’s called WebP.

What do you think of Google’s new image file format? Share your thoughts. 

Here’s a sample of the announcement:

Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time. Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution. As part of this effort, we are releasing a developer preview of a new image format, WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before. 

Images and photos make up about 65% of the bytes transmitted per web page today. They can significantly slow down a user’s web experience, especially on bandwidth-constrained networks such as a mobile network. Images on the web consist primarily of lossy formats such as JPEG, and to a lesser extent lossless formats such as PNG and GIF. Our team focused on improving compression of the lossy images, which constitute the larger percentage of images on the web today.

Those interested in SEO will likely find the status of the format worth paying attention to, as Google recently announced that it now counts page speed as a ranking factor. Just remember, page speed is only one of about 200 ranking factors Google takes into consideration. 

Google has a site set up where you can compare the sizes and load times of JPEGs to WebPs. Google also has a conversion tool to convert images to the new format that can be downloaded, and is working with the web browser and web developer community to add support for the format. 

Google is also developing a patch for WebKit to provide native support for WebP in an upcoming release of Chrome. The company says it also plans to add support for a transparency layer or alpha channel in a future update.

It will be very interesting to see how widely this format gets adopted over time. 

If Google can gain enough support for WebP, will you use it for your web images? Will they gain the support? Let us know. 

Google’s been growing more and more focused on speed in recent weeks.  Last month alone, there were two major developments as the SPDY research project was announced and Matt Cutts indicated that Google might make page speed a ranking factor in 2010.

Now, a post on the Webmaster Central Blog has explained, "On Site Performance, you’ll find how fast your pages load, how they’ve fared over time, how your site’s load time compares to that of other sites, examples of specific pages and their actual page load times, and Page Speed suggestions that can help reduce user-perceived latency."

Additional information and recommendations should become available over time, too.

This tool should benefit just about everyone, considering that most sites’ visitors are impatient and sites do better when they stick around.  If you notice something odd (or good) about the Site Performance feature, just be sure to let Google know through the Webmaster Tools Forum.

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> Google: Page Speed May Become A Ranking Factor In 2010

> Google Announces SPDY Application-Layer Protocol

> Google Provides Tool For Speeding Up Web Pages

"To put it simply, we aggregate the URLs visited by our users who opt-in to enhanced features and analyze the resulting data to help us improve our products," says Google Product Manager Aseem Sood. "In that sense, it is similar to our other opt-in mechanisms, like crash reporting in Google Chrome or help center surveys that allow users to provide valuable feedback to us."

"One great example of how this data helps improve our products can be seen in our malware detection efforts," continues Sood. "By getting a better sense of the most visited sites on the web, we’re able to focus Google’s automated malware scanners on the most popular URLs that users are currently visiting. This data is then used to power Google’s SafeBrowsing feature which provides alerts to users searching on Google or who are browsing the web using Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome, that the site they want to visit may harm their computer."

Google also uses the data as a "page load timer". When a user’s browser sends out a request to fetch Google Maps, for example, Google starts the timer. They stop it once the page is finished loading. As you may know, Google has been all about speeding up the web (particularly its own sites).

Google launched the "Let’s Make the Web faster" site back in June, as an initiative to get webmasters to help the company make the web faster. Google also launched the Page Speed Tool, which helps site owners and developers identify ways to make their sites load quicker.

Google is embarking on what one Googler says will be "a series of difficult advocacy steps" to help companies, ISPs, and webmasters contribute to making the web faster. Google has started by launching a site at code.google.com/speed, which serves as a resource for webmasters with tutorials, tips, and performance tools. To emphasize what Google is trying to do, they have also released this video:

In addition, one of Google’s familiar faces, Matt Cutts, is also pointing to a video in which he discusses page loading times and how they relate to search.

What impact do site load times have on Google’s rankings? Cutts says the short answer is "none." If a site takes so long to load that Googlebot can’t even get a copy of it, then that will hurt, but if it’s a question of 1 seconds vs. 2 seconds, it is not a factor. Hear the rest of what Cutts has to say about it in the following clip:

A few tips Cutts gives for faster load times include:

- Don’t include 40 different javascript files

- Don’t include huge images when you’re image size is only set to something small

- Gzip pages

It’s really about user experience. Cutts says not to look at it from a search engine ranking perspective "right now." There is always the possibility that this will change in the future.

Getting the entire web to contribute to Google’s faster-web initiative is probably impossible. I think it’s a great concept, but there are simply too many people out there creating and abandoning sites, blogs, apps, etc. That said, I think there is plenty of room for Google (and all of is influence on the web) to make a huge difference.

Read more about ways Google plans to accomplish its goal

here. Of course they are open to ideas and discussion as well, and you can participate here. What do you think about the initiative? Share your thoughts with WebProNews readers.

Google continues to try and crack down on low quality sites, with their latest planned change apparently aimed at pages stuffed with ads and little else. It will be the most recent pushback against sites made for AdSense, even if Google doesn’t phrase it that way directly.

A new metric, a grade for landing page load time, will become available in AdWords accounts this month. The grade how long it takes for someone to load a landing page once the ad leading to it has been clicked.

Slow loading pages hurt the user experience, and can lead people to abandon those pages, Google noted on the Inside AdWords blog. Once Google drops its load time evaluations onto an account’s Keyword Analysis page, advertisers will have one month to make adjustment.

An additional help article on load times and their impact said those times will be evaluated relative to servers in the geographic region of the site in question.

Poor load time performance translates to a lower Quality Score. This means higher minimum bids for keywords. Keywords that lead to ads on pages that load faster than average could see a positive impact on the Quality Score.

Google provided some suggestions on improving load time. Using fewer redirects, smaller and highly compressed images, avoiding interstitials, and minimizing usage of iframes all made that list of suggestions.

It sounds like Google has a good idea of what it already considers poor load time performers. Their announcement of load time assessment also serves as an early warning to sites that need to make fixes ahead of the implementation of the new metric.

Google previously announced there would be scheduled AdWords maintenance on March 8th. We expect Google to put the system for delivering load time analysis in place across all AdWords accounts during this window.