On Friday, Google made an interesting blog post that stated that Google is now taking into account your website’s speed in its search ranking algorithms.
While, for the moment, only a small number of websites have had their search results affected, it’s hard to believe that this isn’t the beginning of a much larger integration of site speed into Google’s ranking algorithms.
Their justification for this new criteria is that “faster sites create happy users”. They say that people who click on a search result and then have to wait too long for a site to load tend to leave and go to another site. Since Google is all about getting searchers the websites that are relevant, a website that a user leaves prior to it loading is less relevant than a website that a user stays on as Google will interpret this website as being more relevant (ie. the user found what they were looking for).
On the surface, this seems like a plausible reason.
However, I’d like to submit an alternative reason:
Google wants you to think that their search engine is faster than the competitions.
How does this new criteria reinforce this perspective?
We know how important it is to appear on Page One of Google search results. So, let’s say someone searches for something on Google. According to this blog, 90% of search result clicks originate on the first page.
So, if 90% of people click on a result from the first page… and page ranking is affected by site speed, then it would be safe to assume that, as Google increases the value of site speed in page ranking, the faster the site is, the more likely it will be to appear on Page One. (This, of course, is treating all of these site’s SEO efforts equally.)
Now, since faster sites appear on Page One and 90% of users click on Page One links, the lay-user (which is the majority of our customers) will get the impression that Google’s search is faster.
Of course, this isn’t actually true as all Google is doing is directing that 90% to the fastest websites but that doesn’t mean that Google is any faster than any other search engine.
The non-techie isn’t going to analyze this, however, or probably even be aware that this is happening. It will just seem (whether consciously or subconsciously) that Google is faster and that certainly benefits Google.
