Mattcutts video transcript - Does site load time affect rankings

Its time for an other round of grab bag questions. We report all these questions on one and then we send them on a course of many different days, so last time every body complained that they were seeing same red polo shirts for thirty of forty days so we actually brought a bunch of different shirts and we are just sprinkling up and mixing it up a little bit so you get a little more variety in your shirts. So lets start with the first question from Deepesh in newyork.

Deepesh Asks

What impact do site load times have on Google rankings?

The short answer is none right now, so lets give it a little more color so ofcourse if a site took so long to load we can't even fetch it Googlebot cannot get a copy of it, then it will have an affect on your rankings because your site is essentially timing out so if your site is taking 20 or 30 seconds to respond to requests that could be a problem. But if your site takes one second or two seconds there is no problem what so ever on Google's rankings. So that's the short answer. Now lets give it a little more color. If you haven't heard Larry ( Larry page ) talked about how he wants the web to be, he wants the web to be really fast he wants it as fast as a magazine like as soon as you turn the page you are ready for the next page. So the crawler is build of that philosophy. We want the web to be really fast make it a really good experience. So currently Site load time do not have any impact on Google's rankings , what might happen in the future i don't know, i can imagine Google to say we want the web to be faster what can we do to encourage people to make their site faster and how can we get the word out that if your site is faster people will be happier and more likely to come back to your site and use your site more often. We are seeing that on our own site, so it is interesting that we want the web to be fast and we want the site to load quickly right now its not having any effect in our rankings but in future who knows what might be involved so personally i feel its a great idea if you look at some of the ways to make your site load faster. So for example don't include 49 different javascript files you can compact all of them into one Javascript or one CSS file. Don't set huge images which your images are actually meant to be tiny there are lot of ways you can magnify or compact your pages so that it turns faster for users. SO there are a lot of ways that you can look at that is really good for user experience don't worry in search engine perspective right now but it can probably make a lot of difference for your users.

Labels: Mattcutts Video Transcript