Google Incorporates Site Speed Into PageRank Calculation

lee1 writes "Google is now taking into account how fast a page loads in calculating its PageRank. In their own words: '[W]e're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. ... our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. ... While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.' Considering the increasing dilution of high-ranking results by endless series of plagiarizing 'blogs,' brainless forums, and outright scam sites, anything that further reduces the influence of the quality of the content is something I would rather not have. Not that Google asked me."

Asking

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that Google asked me.

Well, now they know that you're an influential Slashdot contributor I'm sure they'll sit up and take notice.

Slowbotted

[Naatach]

Yay! I can DDoS my competitors and have Google endorse it!

Net or Search Neutrality?

[JordanH]

So, now well-connected sites run by media companies will have more relevance in Search results vs. minority opinions put out on a cheap web host?
'Do no evil' is meaningless if you don't actually examine what you are doing.

Re:Where is the 'speed' measured from?

[caffeinemessiah]

Geez, will you at least RTFS?

Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.

The main site serves visitors from the US. Thus, measuring speeds from multiple locations around the US is probably the best thing to do. They're presumably measuring speed from all their datacenters (their crawlers are likely to be distributed across the country (and world), so recording the average speed over multiple crawls would be a good approximation when you're dealing with the scale of Google and the Web).

Re:Sweet

[complacence]

tl;dr

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that is how you create the proper April Fools joke. Why the fuck didn't Slashdot hire you two weeks ago? Does everything have to be immediately apparent these days?

will they offer hosting / cloud computing soon?

[Lazy Jones]

... host your stuff at Google and get the PageRank boost. But that would be evil, no?