14 DAY TRIAL // Google's search ranking algorithms are one of the Universe's great mysteries. Like all great mysteries, they've become almost mystical in nature for some and Google's usual lack of transparency when it comes to search ranking only serves to accentuate this. Now, Google has added another ingredient to the mix, page loading speed now factors in the search results ranking. This move was 'foretold' a few months back and Google has now made it official.
"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," Amit Singhal, google fellow, and Matt Cutts, principal engineer in the Google Search Quality Team, a couple of people with weight at Google, wrote.
"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 on speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites," they explained.
The feature was launched quietly a few weeks ago, but Google is only announcing it now. It's only live for the English version of Google.com, but it will probably be rolled out for local versions and other languages at some point.
As expected, some people aren't too glad about this 'sudden' change, but, when you're dealing with a site this size, someone is always going to have something against any change. And, in practical terms, the change is minor, only affecting about one in 100 searches, Google says. Even so, if you're running a website, it's probably time to check out how it performs. Google even lists a couple of tools for testing your website, the usual things like YSlow and Page Speed and, of course, its own Webmaster Tools.