Google finally came through on a promise they made last year by officially announcing that site performance affects your Google search ranking. In their words:
“Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings…We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.”
The Good News
- This news will encourage sites to get faster, which will make the overall web experience better.
- Performance monitoring and performance engineering will have an even higher ROI, making the case for performance easier.
The Bad News
- The actual impact will be limited, both in terms of search ranking changes and web performance improvement. This new “performance signal” is only one of 200+ signals in determining search rankings, and “fewer than 1% of search queries are affected.”
- There is very little transparency into what performance Google is seeing for your site, which means you don’t know when you are done optimizing, and whether Google considers your site “slow.”
- No other search engine has hinted at doing anything similar, which reduces the impact even more.
My Conclusions
I expect this new signal to affect rankings for only extremely slow sites, leaving most sites (even those that seem slow) untouched.I wouldn’t expect extremely fast sites to see much benefit. I am guessing slow sites are penalized, but fast sites are not rewarded (beyond the implicit reward of slower sites moving downward in the rankings).Google will continue to tweak this metric, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this signal increased in importance over the next few years. What does this mean to you? Unfortunately not much, at least for now. The biggest impact of this news is an increase in the perceived importance of web site performance.
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