Quite awhile ago, Google announced that how quickly your pages load will have an impact – albeit small impact – on their ranking algo. As time goes on, I’m beginning to think they value page load speed more and more. I have a couple reasons:

• My sites are NOTORIOUS for loading slowly. According to Google Webmaster Tools, many of my top sites take 7+ seconds to load and are slower than more than 90% of sites on the web. For me, they only take a few seconds at most. Upon Google’s announcement, I noticed my rankings for several important keywords slowly drop.
• It makes sense from a revenue standpoint for Google to care about page speed. The more pages you can view in a shorter amount of time, the more ads you can view, the more revenue Google can generate. Not to mention, a quick browsing experience will likely mean a more enjoyably time and you’re likely to surf the web for a longer period of time. So the gain is two-fold: more ads crammed into equal browsing time, plus extended viewing time.
• Google continues to provide tools for improving page speed, most recently announcing a tool called Page Speed Online that will provide you specific suggestions for altering your site to improve page load speed.

Page Load Speed has been a huge challenge for us and it’s been very difficult to pin down trouble areas or areas we can improve. Hopefully this new tool will provide more insight as to what we could or should be doing. While caching, using AWS and other measures have been implemented, they’ve seen more improvement from a server stability side than a speed of page loading side.

One thing I’m potentially worried about is that page load speed is out of my hands. It’s possible that our ad network is serving slow loading ads and that – unless THEY improve how fast their ads load – our own pages won’t finish loading any quicker. To test this I suppose I’ll have to ad some of my crappier sites to Google Webmaster Tools and serve adsense only.

By the way Google, I know the Page Speed estimation you provide in Webmaster Tools is only in Labs but there should be a way to indicate we’ve made improvements and we’d like you to check our site for speed again. After all, your spiders are already crawling thousands of our pages daily yet you don’t update this area but once a month at most.

In any case, this is just a reminder to stop being lazy and do the nitty gritty work needed to improve page speed as it’ll be more and more important as time goes on (not only for search results but the experience of your OWN users)! And actually, that makes a 3rd factor why Google would want to focus more on page speed. After they click through to a site, if it loads quickly, they’re likely to browse more on that site for a higher views per visit, therefore creating even more ad impressions.

Alright, that’s it for now!