Don’t Be Too Hasty in Ranking for Site Speed

On Friday Google finally announced that site speed is now one of their ranking factors. However, site owners shouldn’t be falling over each other, scrambling to make their site the quickest on the Internet – the tortoise and hare analogy still applies when it comes to rankings.

Imagine if you will that the tortoise is a site’s content and the hare is, well site speed. We all know who the winner is. The same applies here.

Site Speed is More About Convenience than Ranking

Whereas Google’s announcement has caused a ripple of excitement it shouldn’t be seen as a key component in improving your search ranking – certainly not at the expense of relevance.

Instead, it looks like Google have introduced site speed as a ranking factor, largely through their unwavering desire to enjoy a faster online experience. To this end they estimate that it will only contribute to less than 1% of search queries being affected.

Google Search Quality Team Principal Engineer, Matt Cutts and Google Fellow, Amit Singhai, said: “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.”

Content Remains King

Relevance remains the key to successful search ranking with content king. Google’s decision to air on the side of caution should be heeded by hasty developers keen to strip a site so that it loads quicker. After all making speed a ranking factor emanates from lobbying inside Google.