SES, Page Load Times, and Your Google Rankings

Posted • January 18, 2010 • 2 Comments

The SES January 2010 Edition Touts Page Load Time as a New Google Ranking Factor

When my new edition of SES, the SES London sneak preview edition, arrived just the other day I cracked it open to the Focus: Trends page and was surprised to see a blurb on page load times and Google.

Focus: Trends

Four New Signals in Search

by Eric Enge

Page Load Time

Google engineer Matt Cutts discussed this factor at Pubcon in November. Cutts indicated that there is a strong movement within Google to make page load time a ranking factor because pages that load quickly improve the user experience.

Because that is the case, why not make it a ranking factor? Cutts indicated that Google could start using this within the next year.

Back as early as March 2008 I was talking about page load times effecting your Google rankings.
(Post from Search Engine Optimizician.)
I asked:

Load Time has been confirmed by Google as soon to be AdWords Quality Score metric, can your organic SERPs be far behind?

Or is Load Time already being considered by the Google algorithm?

The post is titled “Does Load Time Effect Your Google Organic Search Listing?”

My suspicions were confirmed at SearchFest 2008.

I can’t give away my source but I was lead to believe that as early as March 2008 page load times were either already a part or soon to be a part of the Google algorithm.

Google SERPs actually do have a page load time element

This post is titled “SEMpxd SearchFest ‘08 | What I learned, Heard, and Won”

Those of you in the general proximity might want to attend SES London February 15 – 19 2010. Here is a code to save you some money.

Late,
Gary Pool

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