Page Speed, a Ranking Factor

A few days ago, Google's Matt Cutts, said that page speed is going to become an important ranking factor for Google. Speed has been considered important lately and Matt even said that Larry Page, the founder of Google wants to see the web as fast as the pages of a newspaper. We noticed the release of new tools focused on improving site performance and speed. The logical consequence of this is that Cutts' suggestion are going to be a reality, if they are not already a key factor. Google strives to deliver great user experience, and wants to deliver results that load as quickly as possible to make the user experience even better.

Google Is Deciding The Way

Some webmasters are accepting the fact that speed will be a ranking factor with no criticism, and some webmaster are taking it as a negative change. Some complain that the big fish will have the vantage because have the money for the expensive hosting or they won't get good rankings in search engines. Some people are afraid that Google is squeezing the average Joe from search results giving the advantage to big corporations! Well, in my opinion this is not going to happen, you will just need some tweaks to your site to stay competitive.

This one is going to be for sure a political issue, concerns about the net neutrality are going to come up, the people against speeding up the web advocate that countries who's internet is inferior to the technology of the rich countries, are going to be penalized. I don't think that this makes Google less democratic, not at all, it is just that you need to invest a little bit more of money to get a good performing server, and some tweaks need to be done to faster loading sites, I agree as long as we strive to get a better user experience we will get more users and more people happy with the web.

How About Rich Media??

Regardless of your ideas about it, Google is already using page speed as a ranking factor, or if not is going to do it pretty soon, and as a site or blog owner you are going to have to deal with it.

What do you think will happen to the sites that are mainly using rich media like video blogs? Can they really accelerate their load time? If not, are they doomed to drop from the SERP?

Instead of complaining you have to take action and update your site with the latest tweaks, The speed has to concern you already even if you think is a conspiracy against the small guy, you can get good result with little money the tweeks are explained by Google, so no excuse for not implementing them. Don't think that big corporations are going to take over and knock out who can't afford a dedicated lightning fast server, we can speed up your site even if is not a dedicated server.

Site Speed Emphasis

Google doesn't just warn you about the new ranking factor, but is giving tips and answers to resolve the issue, and in fact offered plenty of explanation about how to be able to use the latest Webmaster Tools. The "Site Performance Feature", shows you an overview graph. The tool looks at the speed performance of your site, infact the Google Toolbar that people have installed give them the stats.

If your site is in Italy, and your users are there, the chart is going to reflect the load time that people experience in Italy as well as if your users use high-speed broadband, it would be reflected in the stats also. The only problem is if your visitors don't use the Google Toolbar you will not be able to get the data in the Webmaster Tools."

Performance Overview

There is a page that shows you examples of pages and the load times that users experienced while on your site. This section helps to identify pages that take longer than average to load, these pages are the ones that frustrate your user, even pages which are not allowed from crawling can be measured by the tool because they will be still a significant part of the site's user experience. You have to start to watch the load times to see what's the average. If you see high load performances, that is probably what most people experience.

Performance Examples

In the Google Webmaster Tools they made a section that allow you to see your "Page Speed" and it gives you suggestions. In the example pages taken from your site Google gives you tips on how to optimize specific problem pages, suggestions that are based on Google's Page Speed Firebug plug-in, that is in Firefox.