Page Load Time a Part of Google Algo ?

It has often been argued in the SEO world whether or not page load time affects your organic ranking. While there has been no definitive statement from the search engines most good SEOs would suggest all possible methods to reduce page load time for delivering a better user experience. (and yes that too is a part of a SEOs Job).

Google did declare that they would be considering Page load time in calculating the quality score of a landing page in Adwords more than a year back, however, they have been silent about its impact on the organic front.

Though not a clear statement yet, Google now has given a clear indication to the webmasters about the importance of page load time by including the “Site Performance” tool in their webmaster tool set.

This is a wonderful tool that gives you a detailed graphical representation of your page’s load time as well as a relative value of its slowness / fastness ( e.g., slower than 53% of websites etc ) compared to other websites .

In addition the tool also points out some of the pages that are guilty of being slow and a detailed diagnosis of those pages pointing out exactly what is causing the delay and how you can make your website faster.

Now with such a wonderful tool available ( and remember its Free !) there is no reason why you should have a slow website. So get your website registered with Google Webmaster Tools ( if you are not registered yet) and use the site performance tool to reduce your page load time.

Let’s all work towards a faster web!