Just after April Fools, Google added speed and response time delivered at a website as part of its page ranking algorithm. The full details can be found here at the Google Webmaster Central site where Google not only explains some of the rationale about using speed in the rankings but also provides a listing of free tools to measure and monitor your website’s performance. There is also an excellent discussion of the implications here at the WebOptimizations site where some of the factors for why speed/response time in browsing is important are discussed in much greater detail. Finally the announcement is already starting to ripple as the free CMS Drupal’s strategy of going for scale over response time is discussed at InfoWorld. But this equation of speedy response time with website popularity is a known quantity for any who have perused the Alexa rankings of websites. Speed is a factor but quality content remains king.
