Matt Cutts from Google said there are strong chances of Google introducing a new ranking factor into the search result algorithm. The new ranking factor has to do with ‘how fast a site or page loads?’.
Matt explained that page speed is a factor in search ad AdWords quality score and there’s currently a strong push to make it a factor in organic ranking algorithm.
Keeping 2 things in mind:
(1) There are over 200 ranking factors in the algorithm and each are weighted differently. If I had to guess, page speed would not be a tremendously weighed factor, unless the site takes 90 seconds to load.
(2) Monitoring complaints from the AdWords (and organic) side of webmasters and virtually no one complains that their quality score is low because of having a slow site. I would have to assume the same speed criteria would be applied from the quality score page speed requirements to the organic side of things. So if advertisers rarely, if never, complain about it – one would assume non-advertisers would also not complain much about that as a reason for their site’s poor ranking. This makes lot of sense for advertisers to advertise on faster loading websites than on slowly loading websites.
p.s. If you are web developer\designer and code\design all your blog pages by yourself, there is a tool called page speed, which is used by Google to test its own page loading speed. It’s a Firefox extension which can be used with firebug. If you are interested, you can grab yourself the plug-in from here.
