Forge Web

Not too long ago, Google’s Matt Cutts hinted that the speed of pages could become a factor in Google’s magic recipe for high rankings in their search page results. The idea of the change got a lot of people going, mainly because not too many people out there are running their sites on dedicated servers like we are or developed in well optimized code. Truth be told, shared hosting just doesn’t belong with websites actually making serious money online, but that’s its own can of worms we’ll save for another day.

Apparently bloggers got a little too excited and assumed that page speed might come to trump the importance of relevancy, which is just plain silly. Still, to put all speculation to rest, Matt Cutts has created a video to clarify on the subject. As it turns out, Google has over 200 signals in scoring page relevancy, in hopes of providing the most relevant and useful content in the search results. However, Matt did mention that it is in his opinion that of two sites of equal relevance, users would prefer one that is faster, and would be interested to try it out in scoring.

Regardless of whether page speed does become one of the 200+ signals in scoring, I wouldn’t wait around before taking action. Make your site as fast as possible, focusing on the user experience, and doing so will automatically put you in line with Google’s vision for the web. You could wait until one of the still employed SEOs tries to take a stab at it by speculating, but why? Providing a better user experience with highly relevant content is where you want to put your time and money and not entertaining guesses, even supposed educated ones.