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Mobile Site Speed To Be A Google Ranking Factor?

Google has clearly had it with sites that have lackluster mobile experiences. This week, the company took to its Webmater Central blog to discuss “several ranking changes” it’s prepa...
Mobile Site Speed To Be A Google Ranking Factor?
Written by Chris Crum
  • Google has clearly had it with sites that have lackluster mobile experiences. This week, the company took to its Webmater Central blog to discuss “several ranking changes” it’s preparing for sites not configured for smartphone users.

    But that’s not all.

    Google’s Matt Cutts spoke at SMX Advanced on Tuesday evening, and implied that Google might roll out a version of its site speed ranking factor for mobile sites. Google officially revealed that site speed was a ranking factor for search over three years ago after placing a great deal of emphasis on speed for quite some time before that.

    Fast forward to 2013, and mobile has grown a lot. Google is making it so you have no excuse to treat your mobile content with less regard than your desktop content. Frankly, sites should be optimizing for mobile anyway, simply for the benefit of their users, but if ignoring the mobile experience is going to cost sites search rankings, perhaps this will light a fire under their butts to do something about poor mobile site performance.

    Here’s the relevant section of Search Engine Land’s liveblogged account of what Cutts said about mobile page speed:

    At Google I/O, there was a session on instant mobile websites – there were page speed recommendations. We’ve said that before about desktop sites, we might start doing the same thing about mobile websites.

    By the way, Cutts said at the event that the smartphone-related changes discussed in the blog post have been approved, but that he’s not sure when they’ll roll out.

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