Taking some time out from his travelling, Matt Cutts (Head of Spam at Google) has provided some insight into how web page speed will now affect a websites ranking. Also, he’s telling everyone not to panic. The fact is that with the release actually coming a few weeks ago on Google.com, few people seem to have noticed any real difference.
And this is pretty much what Google seem to have intended from the off-set as this was really developed as a minor addition to over 200 factors which effect search rankings. Furthermore, what Matt seems to suggest is that the powers that be at Google wanted to give a little more incentive for site owners to optimise their sites for speed.
“Relevancy is the most important. If you have two sites that are equally relevant same back links, everything else is the same, you’d probably prefer the one that’s a little bit faster. So page speed can, in theory, be an interesting addition” say Matt Cutts. However he also reiterates that relevancy will remain at the top of the list. “Absolutely, relevance is the primary component and we have over 200 signals in our scoring.”
The fact is that while Google suggest less than one percent of search queries will be effected, this is an opportunity they’re hoping smaller website owners and SEO’s will embrace as opposed to take exception to. Some negative responses have come out of the woodwork suggesting that those businesses with deep pockets will stand to benefit as they can afford super fast dedicated servers, or that websites with more video and picture content will suffer.
However, Google have set out to allay these fears by suggesting that the bureaucracy of big businesses will set them back giving smaller privately run websites the upper hand. Furthermore they’ve provided a variety of tools and other suggestions that can help you speed up your site with minimum effort. Matt Cutts also seems very philosophical about the change suggesting that firstly, it is a very minor change (don’t panic) and secondly that this can be of great benefit to your site irrelevant of rankings. Faster site equals happier users, equals more potential conversions.
So it seems that this change by Google is less about changing rankings and more about getting everyone to improve the quality of the web. By throwing in a little incentive, it seems they’re getting a lot of people to do what they should probably already have been doing. Very clever Google.
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