Google to Include Page Load Speed in Ranking Factors

Starting Next Year, the Speed that Your Site Loads May Affect Its SEO Rankings

From the CAP News page:

November 19, 2009 (CAP Newswire) — Google’s search engine engineering leader Matt Cutts has hinted that the changes to next year’s search engine algorithms will include a factoring in of a web page’s load time.

“We are starting to think more and more about whether speed should be a factor in Google’s rankings,” Cutts was recently quoted at Digital Media. “We haven’t used it yet in our web rankings, but a lot of people within Google think the web should be fast, it should be a good experience.”

“Its fair to say if you’re a fast site you should get a bonus, and if you are a slow site, perhaps people don’t want that as much.”

This may be partially an effort to boost interest in the many tools Google has developed to help sites load faster. Either way, it’s hard to regard it as bad news. We all prefer sites that load more quickly. And if your site loads slowly — if you’re in online gaming affiliate marketing or any other business — well, that’s an issue you need to address immediately, regardless of this news.

Click here to read the original article at Digital Media.