Google Using Site Speed For Ranking?

We had heard some crazy rumors about Google taking into account site speed when it comes to ranking websites in their SERPs. Well, that seems to be official now. Google has announced that site speed is officially being considered towards website rankings in the SERPs.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.

I have mixed feeling about this. It’s true that Google will not give this factor a whole lot of importance in comparison to factors that determine the relevancy of your website to the searched keywords. Having a speedy website makes life easier on visitors and could improve ROI as well. But a speedy splog is not exactly what I call a user friendly website.

If you are a webmaster, you shouldn’t panic at this point. There are tools you can take advantage of to find out ways to optimize the speed of your website. In fact, Google itself discussed a few tools when announcing this move:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.

Google has implemented these changes a few weeks back. So if your site hasn’t disappeared from the face of the earth, there is a good chance you haven’t been affected by this move. But it’s still not clear how Google will apply speed towards a website’s rankings. How slow is too slow? Of course, Google never discusses its algorithm with us users, so this is yet another uncertainty added to the mix.

You certainly want to do your best to improve your website’s performance. But you don’t want to do it for Google. Google is not your audience. You should care more about your users. So don’t go out of your way, cut corners, and take away from things your visitors have come to love just to make Google happy (or think you are doing it).

Google promises that content relevancy will still be more important even with all these new changes coming into play. Let’s hope so. It’d be a shame if Google pushes those splogs and thin sites (that still do rank high for terms even though Google claimed they wouldn’t) even higher in the rankings for their Site Speed.