Speed

Congratulations graduate! Google’s Page Speed Online tool has been moved from what’s left of Google Labs to make the cut and move into the real world. This means a few things.

The SEO community has been discussing just how important page load speeds are for their sites especially in relation to Google. While the following news from Google doesn’t say just how important it is as a ranking factor, it does show that Google finds it important enough to develop a service offering around it called Page Speed service.

There has been plenty of talk about just what signals Google is using for search placement. What are the social signals? Will +1 play a role? Honestly, since SERP’s can be so different for every searcher you always have to wonder these days, right?

(I’m in the middle of traveling, but I know that a lot of people will be interested in the news that Google is incorporating site speed as one of the over 200 signals that we use in determining search rankings. I wanted to jot down some quick thoughts.)

The main thing I want to get across is: don’t panic. We mentioned site speed as early as last year, and you can watch this video from February where I pointed out that we still put much more weight on factors like relevance, topicality, reputation, value-add, etc. — all the factors that you probably think about all the time. Compared to those signals, site speed will carry much less weight.