Google Now Considers Site Speed When Ranking Websites

Darren Franks - April 20, 2010

Last week, Google officially announced on their blog that “we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed.” What does this mean to webmasters and practitioners of SEO? Not much really, when you take into account that most good SEOs already consider site speed to be a huge part of their optimization efforts. After all, the quicker your site loads, the easier it is for the search engines to get to the most important pages on a site. Site speed is obviously also good for user experience and keeping those bounce rates at a low level.

However, the reason it may be more prudent for the less fastidious SEO to speed up page load times is that the load times are now part of the algorithms in that even if you have a site with great content and inbound links, if your pages take forever to load, Google may see fit to not rank you as high. What are some of the basic housekeeping tips to speed up page load times?

Steps for speeding up a website include: Removing or minimizing CSS, JavaScript and tables where you can, minimizing redirects by making your application update URL references whenever resources change their location and trying to use the least amount of comments code. Google has even provided a list of resources to help webmasters with all of the page speed best practices: http://code.google.com/speed/.