Earlier this month Google announced officially that site speed was now part of their search ranking criteria.Given that is has been a few weeks since Google made this announcement, I want to share what I think are more far reaching ramifications of this change.

Google claims less than 1% of sites will be affected by this change to their ranking algorithm, but I think the further reaching affect of this change is that sites that have difficulty with up time will suffer even more.

In my experience sites that have to deal with a lot of real time data such as travel sites and ticket sites often suffer unexpected down time or have pages become unavailable unexpectedly and take a long time for custom 404s to return. The new speed component could potentially really affect these types of sites. While real time data is in demand, I think real time data also just became that much more risky to use from an SEO perspective.

These types of changes by Google are going to force many sites dealing with real time data to become better at caching and to potentially build in short delays in the data to protect themselves from having a significant number of incidents.

Google provides a nice list of tools that you can use to gauge site speed and some of them also provide useful types on areas for improvement so that webmasters can actually identify and fix problems.

While I don’t think most sites should consider a redesign just to address this change by Google, I think moving forward, when it comes time to adopt new technologies and create new functionality for existing websites site speed is going to be a component that is going to have to remain in the forefront of developers minds.

For really slow sites, sites that were considering a redesign, and or sites that are testing new cumbersome technologies this could be the perfect impetus to take the plunge and either make drastic adjustments or start over.

Finally everyone should take the time to read what Matt Cutts has to say about the latest set of changes.

Article written by Roderick Ioerger