The short answer is, none right now. Now, let’s give it a little more color. Of course, if a site takes so long to load that Googlebot can’t get a copy of that, then that will have an effect on your rankings because your site is essentially timing out.
If your site takes 20-30 seconds to respond to requests, that could be a problem. But, if your site takes one second versus two seconds, that has no difference whatsoever on Google’s rankings. That’s the short answer.
Now, let’s give it a little more color. If you haven’t heard, Larry Page has talked about how he wants web to be. He wants the web to be really fast, almost as fast as a magazine, like as soon as you can turn the page, you’re ready for the next page.
Chrome was built with that philosophy, we want to make the web really fast, we want to make it a really good experience.
Currently, site load times have no effect on rankings. What might happen in the future, I don’t know. I can certainly imagine Google saying ‘What, we’d like the web to be faster, what can we do to encourage people to make their sites faster’ and how can we try to get the word out that if your site’s faster, people would be happier and more likely to come back to your site or use your site more often.
We’ve been saying that on our own site. It is interesting that we want the web to be faster, and we want sites to load quickly. Right now, it’s not effect at all on our rankings.
For the future, who knows what may be involved. Personally, I think it’s a great idea if you could look at the ways to make your site a little faster. For example, don’t include 40 different JavaScript files, you can compact those all into one JavaScript or one CSS file, don’t include huge images when your image size is set to something tiny.
There are a lot of ways that you can minify or compact your pages to make them return faster for users. There’s a lot of ways that you can look at that’s really good for user experience. Don’t worry about it from the search engine ranking perspective right now, but it probably can make a really big difference for your users.
Related posts:
- How does Google calculate site load times in the data it exposes in Google’s Webmaster statistics? Is the calculation simply average time to get and receive the HTML content for a page?
- Why does Google crawl/index blogs (specifically sites notified by “WordPress XMLRPC pings”) so much faster than a “normal” site submitting a revised Sitemap? What is the impact of that on the overall “quality” of the index?
- Now that Google can crawl JavaScript links, what is going to happen to all those paid links that were behind JavaScript code? Will Google start penalizing them?
- In regards to new canonicalization tag, does it make sense for large corporations to consider placing that tag on every page due to marketing tracking codes and large levels of duplicate URLs like faceted pages and load balancing servers?
- What impact does server location have on Google rankings?
