12 April 2010 | Author: D. Warburton Search Copywriter

Site speed goes live as Google ranking factor

Google has announced that its plan to include page load times as a ranking factor has now gone live in search results.

The search seraph first unveiled its plan to promote faster loading webpages last November, encouraging more webmasters to ensure that their sites were loading as quickly as possible. An eagle-eyed bigmouth previously explained how preloading components can help reduce loading times, and there are also financial benefits that can come from operating faster loading sites.

Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts explained in the Google Webmaster Central blog: "Faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs."

According to Desire Athow of ITProPortal.com, the "virtuous circle" generated by improved site speed will also help attract and retain users, who won't be as likely to venture elsewhere for products and services.

With over 200 ranking factors helping Google's search engine choose which pages to present to users in SERPs, speed is only expected to play a comparatively minor role, and will mainly involve penalising pages with excessive loading times of around 20 seconds or longer. Google executives estimate that speed currently accounts for less than one per cent of page ranking at this stage, as it has only been rolled out to English searches from the international portal Google.com.

While the decision to promote faster loading websites should improve usability, it has been suggested that Google's move could see smaller sites - who can't afford to maintain fast servers - unfairly penalised. However, the Mountain View giant has assured users that ranking factors such as speed will never usurp the core value of relevance when delivering search results.

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