Website Speed - New Google Ranking Factor?

**airforce1** · 27 November, 2009, 07:07 AM

I don't know why Google considers to include this factor for ranking for this factor is not under control by the site owner.

**Shenron** · 27 November, 2009, 08:04 AM

Originally Posted by airforce1

I don't know why Google considers to include this factor for ranking for this factor is not under control by the site owner.

How come?
Who's in control then?

**Aziz** · 27 November, 2009, 08:51 AM

he could be taking about the hosting server. But maybe in that case, Google's advanced algorithms check the loading speed of cached pages in google's own servers instead of original page

**airforce1** · 29 November, 2009, 08:26 AM

Originally Posted by Aziz

he could be taking about the hosting server. But maybe in that case, Google's advanced algorithms check the loading speed of cached pages in google's own servers instead of original page

Right, I do think so.

I think some information from Google looks really weird for me like they would not use description meta tags and they are going to omit backlinks from blog commenting.

**bogart** · 4 December, 2009, 12:52 PM

Google has announced the beta of Site Performance in Webmaster Tools that shows the speed of your site as well as suggestions to fix speed issues.

Google LoadRank is determined from "aggregated information sent by users of your site who have installed the Google Toolbar"

**abinowbhat** · 4 December, 2009, 13:54 PM

Thanks for sharing the information. My sites are on shared hosting, will need to move to VPS

**Loko** · 10 April, 2010, 19:45 PM

Google now officially considers site speed a ranking factor.

Using site speed in web search ranking

Interesting part:

implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point

**TopDogger** · 10 April, 2010, 19:58 PM

They implemented this a lot faster than most people expected. The only thing that was previously stated was that they were "considering" this addition some time this year.

I hope they really wack all of the news sites with pages so overloaded with ads that they take 30 seconds to load with a high speed connection. Also, I suspect that all of the WordPress sites with 1.5 meg home pages will suffer a bit.

Although hosting plays a big role with response times, so do things like bloated code, poorly written code, overly large images, excessive database calls, excessive server requests, etc., which are under the control of a site owner.

**bogart** · 11 April, 2010, 10:03 AM

Originally Posted by TopDogger

They implemented this a lot faster than most people expected. The only thing that was previously stated was that they were "considering" this addition some time this year.

Seems like some elements of Caffeine are being incorporated into the current algorithm. The Caffeine rollout is at the least months away. But some of the infrastructure should already be in place.

**TopDogger** · 11 April, 2010, 13:26 PM

Loading time wasn't originally part of Caffeine. While Matt Cutts was talking about rolling out Caffeine some time after the holidays, he was also talking about considering introducing page speed some time this year. He never actually said that it was part of Caffeine. A lot of people simply made that assumption.

It does look like Caffeine has been pushed back and they are focusing more on other issues. Although I am not sure if anyone would notice when they do introduce Caffeine. It is supposed to be primarily an infrastructure change that speeds up searches.