Intense lobbying within Google recently has prompted Matt Cutts, Google’s spam chief, to announce a potential new addition to the search algorithm next year.
Speaking at the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas that just concluded, Cutts says Google’s co-founders want search to be real fast – like flipping through a magazine. They would like faster web pages to rank better than slower ones. It’s already a factor in the AdWords quality score, but there is now a big push to include site speed for the organic search algorithm as well.
It was implied at the conference by Cutts that it’s a real possibility for 2010.
Rusty Brick, who attended the conference, speculated that it won’t be too major however unless the page takes an extremely long time to load. Each of the over 200 ranking factors in Google’s algorithm are weighed differently.
Virtually no one on the forums complains of the quality score of their AdWords sites is affected by site speed. It’s assumed that the same criteria will be applied to the organic ranking algorithm.
Stay tuned to the search engine optimization blog at SEO Advantage for more developments on this issue…but expect it to be one more factor in how sites are ranked in the search engines next year.