Sometime last year, Google’s Matt Cutts told Web Pro News that page speed is becoming a factor that Google will look at for ranking search results. This comment got a lot of attention because Google never took this into consideration for ranking Web sites in the past. This is because a lot of site owners don’t have fast sites and this can damage their search rankings.
Cutts never mentioned that page speed would be any more important of a ranking factor than anything else, which people over the Internet jumped to conclusions.
“No. Relevancy is the most important. If you have two sites that are equally relevant (same backlinks…everything else is the same), you’d probably prefer the one that’s a little bit faster, so page speed can be an interesting theory to try out for a factor in scoring different websites. But absolutely, relevance is the primary component, and we have over 200 signals in our scoring to try to return the most relevant, the most useful, and the most accurate search result that we can find. That’s not going to change,” Cutts said in a video response.
“If you can speed your site up, it’s really good for users, as well as potentially down the road, being good for search engines,” he says. “So it’s something that people within Google have thought about.”
It’s interesting people would assume page speed is more important than relevance to Google because Cutts made a comment that page speed will be one of the many factors that Google will use. If that were the case, Google would be placing emphasis on page speed for a while now. However, it’s worth thinking about how big a factor page speed can play.
The important thing would be to make your Web site fast and user-friendly as much as possible. Google offers webmasters different tools to help make their sites faster. This is part of Google’s initiative to “make the web faster.”