On Google’s Official Webmaster Central Blog it was confirmed that Google now factors a site’s load-speed when assessing its search ranking.

Many blog commenters & readers have expressed concerns and doubts over the reason for Google’s new signal in search ranking. Take into account, that slow page loading speeds is attributed to Google’s own Analytics script or  AdSense code.

Are these doubts about major ranking damage warranted on the average website?

It has been known in webmaster circles for a few months that Google was going to factor this into their page ranking factors. However, when comparing the ranking of a slow versus fast loading web site, there has been no negative differences in search engine rankings.

Whenever Google does something new, there is an initial concern from the webmaster community.
It is possible to believe that this is a win-win situation for both Google and the user experience, the ultimate agenda here could be to improve the indexing capabilities of the search engine servers, thereby returning more relevant and up-to-date results for searchers.

Matt Cutts said: “People shouldn’t stress out too much about Site-Speed, and the reason is that we’re always going to care first and foremost about quality. How good is a page for users? Don’t think it’s going to be the largest of the two-hundred factors.“

We are all test dummies in one of the worlds largest experiments.

Google shows different versions of pages to users and records their response. This data is important for improving the search service. By gauging the users preferred search options Google can refine the search results page and ultimatley the speed of their service.

There is a direct correlation between the speed of the service and amount of data that users request. If you have been using the internet for at least 5 years then you will have experienced the internet evolution to broadband speed. Quicker downloads allow users to surf more.

This is also relevant to page data size. When Google trimmed the Google Maps page size from 120KB down by about 30 percent, the company started getting about 30 percent more map requests. “It was almost proportional. If you make a product faster, you get that back in terms of increased usage,” said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, in a speech at the Google I/O conference.

Another important page element includes white space around images. Every component must be considered for optimising speed. High speed internet access has lead to complacency in this area. When internet access was limited to dial-up, this was an important consideration in page design.

Unfortunately, web pages have become bloated with technology, such as flash and microsoft code. It’s up to today’s web site developers to use existing technologies, such as CSS or AJAX, for efficiency.

Yahoo will be rolling out some changes to their crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. There may be some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index. What effect will this have current and future indexes?

For more info and discussion visit Yahoo Search Blog