Google’s highly secretive rankings algorithm already seemingly has 1,000 indicators. Make it 1,001. The Magnates of Mountain View announced this past week that “site speed” will now be considered in search engine rankings, and my personal response echoes the cacophony of confused cries of patrons from all over SEO World – What exactly qualifies as “site speed?”
You see, while the notoriously confidential folks at Google were kind enough to throw us this latest nugget, they conveniently left out an adequate accompanying definition of just what they really mean by site speed.
Here’s Google’s vague definition: Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
But what say Google about the infinite combinations of web browsers, PCs and internet connections that users employ in their individual web experience? Is site speed derived from a mass average of every internet user in America, or does it simply reflect the respective experience of Larry Page? What’s more important: A site’s surfability or crawlability?
Google does offer a number of helpful tools to resolve any site speed issues you might have (that list is available below), but the entire concept still begs several questions: Will generic static HTML sites have a decisive advantage over more valuable sites whose speed is bogged down by useful educational tools? Will an abundance of photos and multimedia apps have a negative impact on your site? What about pages loading from third-party URLs, like iFrames?
It’s likely impossible to say. All a SEOer can do is test, test, test. Google did say that page relevance will continue to be the dominant variable and that only 1% of sites will be affected by site speed. Thus, perhaps this latest announcement will prove utterly inconsequential. But if you find your prized No. 1 ranking for that key phrase has fallen to No. 2, at least you’ll know why. Your site speed is inadequate.
And here are some tools to help get number one rankings back!
•    Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
•    YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
•    WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
•    In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below.
•    Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.