Google Plans to Include Website Speed In Its Ranking Algorithm

According to a recent blog post of Google engineers, Google was considering taking website speed into account when determining a website's ranking in its search engine. In this post, I'd like to go through this news together with you and see what it means to us webmasters.

Google's logic is, the higher the website's loading speed, the happier the visitor will be. Generally speaking, if the website takes a long time to load, the visitor would stay for a much shorter timer on that website. What's more, a faster website will not only enhance user experience but reduce the website's operational cost as well. Google has long been renowned for viewing user experience as its top priority. Including website speed in its search engine ranking algorithm will certainly provide a productive addition to its value proposition.

There is one question that we webmasters concern most - Does the inclusion of website speed will change a website's ranking greatly? The answer is, not really! As mentioned by the Google engineers in that post, too, the weight assigned to website speed is far less than that of the relatedness of the website to the search keyword. Therefore, the current ranking results, if not for other reason, won't change much. According to an estimate, only less than 10% of the ranking results might be affected by the change made in the ranking algorithm. In one word, we webmasters don't need to get panic at all.

To better cope with the change, we should understand how Google measures a certain website's loading speed. The method is quite straightforward. It can either check its famous crawler's responsiveness or check the tracking result retrieved through the Google toolbar.

Arriving here, we've got a better idea about why Google might consider the inclusion of website speed, what the change's impact is, and how Google checks the website speed. Although we can't know exactly the impact until after the change takes effect, it's always a good idea that we choose a faster web host instead of focusing on how much the host costs alone.