Google Counts Site Speed As A Ranking Factor

Hi Everyone,
Website speed is now a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, and is already in place for U.S. searchers. But Google also cautions web site owners not to sacrifice relevance in the name of faster web pages, and even says this new ranking factor will impact very few queries. More on that below, but first the background on today’s announcement from Google Fellow Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team.

Why Page Speed Matters

The first warning that site speed was on Google’s radar came last November, when Cutts said there was “strong lobbying” inside Google to account for site speed as a new ranking factor. Speaking at SMX West last month, Google’s Maile Ohye showed a slide indicating that delays of under a half-second impact business metrics.

In addition to the numerous studies over the years that show Internet users prefer fast pages, Singhal says Google ran its own testing on how users respond to page speed, including experiments on Google.com. Singhal and Cutts point to a June 2009 blog post on the Google Research Blog that talked about how Google purposely slowed down its search results to measure the impact on search behavior.

Our experiments demonstrate that slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user of -0.2% to -0.6% (averaged over four or six weeks depending on the experiment). That’s 0.2% to 0.6% fewer searches for changes under half a second!
“When we slow our own users down [on Google.com], we see less engagement,” Singhal says. “Users love fast sites. A faster web is a good thing all around.”

How Google Measures Page Speed

Singhal says there are two primary ways Google will measure page speed :

1. How a page responds to Googlebot

2. Load time as measured by the Google Toolbar