Google Today announced that Site Speed will be the Next New Ranking Factor in Google’s algorithm, Google has first introduce this last year when Matt Cutts said that there was strong lobbying  inside Google to account for site speed as a new ranking factor. Speaking at SMX West last month, Google’s Maile Ohye showed a slide indicating that delays of under a half-second impact business metrics. But Google also cautions web site owners not to sacrifice relevance in the name of faster web pages, and even says this new ranking factor will impact very few queries. Google also reveled that they have already implanted speed factor for US Searchers.

Amit Singhal a Googler says Google ran its own testing on how users respond to page speed, including experiments on Google.com. Singhal and Cutts point to a June 2009 blog post on the Google Research Blog that talked about how Google purposely slowed down its search results to measure the impact on search behavior. Our experiments demonstrate that slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user of -0.2% to -0.6% (averaged over four or six weeks depending on the experiment). That’s 0.2% to 0.6% fewer searches for changes under half a second!

“When we slow our own users down [on Google.com], we see less engagement,” Singhal says. “Users love fast sites. A faster web is a good thing all around.”

How Google Measures Page Speed

Singhal says there are two primary ways Google will measure page speed:

1. How a page responds to Googlebot
2. Load time as measured by the Google Toolbar
In December, Google added a page speed report to Webmasters Tools in the “Labs” section. The report shows how fast your site loads, specifically calls out several pages on your site, and offers suggestions to improve page speed.

“Quality should still be the first and foremost concern [for site owners],” Cutts says. “This change affects outliers; we estimate that fewer than 1% of queries will be impacted. If you’re the best resource, you’ll probably still come up.”

Singhal says the focus remains on improving the user experience on Google.com, and the company can’t do that if it gets the relevance of search results wrong. “We want to return faster sites,” he says, “but not at the expense of relevance.”

Google further says this ranking change has no relation to its upcoming Caffeine rollout, which is about how Google indexes the web, not how it ranks pages.

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