With all the Google buzz in promoting the “Page Speed” Firefox plugin to enhance speed of websites and also its campaign to have a faster internet and faster websites, one would wonder if Google’s next target to optimize its search results would be page speed.
Though page speed does have certain value while ranking pages, most search engine optimizers would not accept it to be one of the top factors. This is just because, Google and webmasters know that most of the sites on internet is either not well optimized to be faster or has huge applications running that will definitely make it slower. Also, a site speed does not depend solely on programming factors. It can depend on the media each page caries, graphics, server speed, traffic at the point of time and many more.
However, Matt Cutts has now clarified on this misconception. To a question if Google would consider Page Speed as much as relevancy by WebProNews, Matt Cutts answer was, relevancy by WebProNews, Matt Cutts answer was, “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, the most accurate search result that we can find. That’s not going to change.”
Matt Cutts also added, “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.”