Matt Cutts of Google has confirmed in the past few months that Google has begun looking at page load times and taking a site’s speed into account within the search algorithm. This rollout will be a gradual one and won’t take full effect for another few months. Site speed was already a factor for pay per click advertising. In order to get the best ad rates, sites had to meet certain page load time requirements.

It’s important to note this now during each project we build. For example, a site whose pages take half a second to load versus a competitor that only takes a quarter of a second will be penalized.

“Site administrators must take into account not only the size of the page but the size of images on a page. Additionally, extraneous media and scripting can cause slower load times. Ideally, the entire page load including all external calls etc should be 100kb or less, in accordance with Google’s guidelines. Here are the three main things to consider with respect to file size and site speed:

• File size of page code
• File size of images rendered on a page
• The number of requests the page makes to other files on the site including calls to css/js/feeds etc.”

Google is saying that the effects of this algorithm change will be minimal (affecting fewer than 1% of search queries) but that is likely to change. Also, I’ve had at least one retail search marketing client (we have not done any development on their site) whose website has taken 20-30 seconds to load at various times. They will obviously fall into that “less than 1%”.

More than ever, each company’s approach to coding and design will directly impact our clients ability to compete in search engine rankings, and therefore MarketNet has begun taking this new factor into consideration during the planning stages of each project.