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Site Performance Feature Added To Google WMT Labs December 3, 2009

Yesterday, Google has added a new Site Performance feature to Google Webmaster Tools (WMT) Labs.  I think this is a telling sign of things to come.

When I attended Pubcon 2009 in Las Vegas last month (an excellent search engine marketing conference for those who have never heard of it), after the last session there was a “Google/Bing Smackdown” in the keynote hall.  Matt Cutts represented Google in the smackdown, and it was here that he stated that many at Google were lobbying to add page load times as a ranking factor in Google’s ranking algorithm.  He made it sound as if they are only considering it at the time, but I, personally, feel it’s a done deal.  It’s likely already part of the Caffeine update that will roll out to all data centers after year end.

Placing importance on site performance (more specifically, page load times) makes a lot of sense if you think about it.  Google will spin it as a way to improve the user experience on your site.  However, I believe they have more selfish reasons behind the change. 

If Google can entice webmasters to improve page load times, they get an instant win at no cost to themselves.  Faster page load times mean that Googlebot can crawl more pages per minute.  With the web ever increasing in the number of sites and pages, this is going to be crucial to Google “keeping up” with the growth going forward.  It is a big part, I believe, of why the re-architected the Google crawling/indexing/ranking infrastructure – to allow crawling, indexing, and ranking more pages faster.

As I mentioned already, IMO site performance/page load times is likely already built into the Caffeine ranking algorithm.  I think Cutts was just trying to get webmasters used to the idea at Pubcon by suggesting it was only being “considered” at the moment.