It would appear that Google is incorporating your site speed (how long it takes to download a page from your website) as part of your search rankings.
You can read the full story here:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/site-speed/
Your site speed affects your visitors
You should also remember having a site that takes long time to download affects visitors. People are impatient and are unwilling to wait more than a few seconds before they leave and go somewhere else.
So if you’re trying to make money with your website by selling products or if you’re trying to get people to opt in to your e-mail list you have a much better chance with a fast website.
Read more about this here:
http://nickstraffictricks.com/409_web-page-analyzer/
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Well, I think it's quite sensible for Google to resort to this. I hate it when sites take ages to load despite of me having a hi-speed broadband connection. It's alright to have a slow speed site when your objective is not to sell to each visitor you get. But, if your site is a purely 'sales-driven' website then it pays to have it load quickly.
Thanks for the news, Nick!
I think pretty much everyone wants sites load quickly and so this is a logical thing to include in their search rankings.
Nich – good to see you picked up on this topic
good to see you picked up on this topic
Thanks for the news, Nick!
.-= Google Boy's last blog ..Responsibilities and Duties =-.
I use firebug in mozilla firefox to check out my page load times. Most of the time I use wp so the pages load quick but sometimes I get carried away with the widgets so I run firebug and then start taking away my useless widgets.
It's fair enough, but performance of my own site seems very variable. I'd hate to think I got spidered one bad day.
I've taken to crawling the site myself to check performance every day.