Google Loves faster-loading pages! Are your pages fast enough?

• Is there any intrinsic SEO value to having faster loading pages organically in Google? Does a faster-loading site receive a boost in the SERPs over say a site that time-outs regularly or loads the full page substantially slower?

Answer: Yes; there does exist very recent evidence that seems to imply that faster page downloads as a result of a faster server or better on-page optimization has measurable, concrete SEO benefits in getting your site to rank higher organically.

In particular, it has been shown that a slow server or a slow-loading graphics heavy webpage can hurt your visitor experience by resulting in long page downloads which cause visitors to bounce back or leave a site page prematurely. Also, if your site is too slow to respond to the search engine robot in a reasonable time frame, the page may not get indexed.

It's the specific issue of bounce back or bounce rate data though that has been getting most of the attention as of late. Mostly because it is now believed to be one of several quality signals that Google uses to algorithmically rank a specific page and site within in its index.

The slower a webpage loads the higher the historical bounce rate, and a high bounce rate may contribute to lower rankings as a signal of poor page quality. In fact, this is already in effect in Google Adwords where site and page load times have been a factor for determining quality page scores for Adwords advertisers since March, 2008.

It's not a stretch to believe that the organic search side of Google is ...