It seems that Google are including a new signal in their search ranking algorithms: site speed (reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests / loads).
Currently fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in Google's implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.
Sounds like an interesting thing to do, though it might also unfairly penalise content rich sites for taking a few moments longer to load than others. Good thing ISPreview is quite a slim design and so we don't have to worry, yet .
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
Currently fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in Google's implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.
Sounds like an interesting thing to do, though it might also unfairly penalise content rich sites for taking a few moments longer to load than others. Good thing ISPreview is quite a slim design and so we don't have to worry, yet .