With Google’s most recent revamp, Google Caffeine, comes a concern among website owners and the search engine optimization (SEO) community: “Is page speed more important than relevance?” Since many site owners do not have the resources to develop a website that loads at lightning speed, this concern has been growing. Although Matt Cutts has explained that the new algorithm will incorporate several factors that determine page ranking, Cutts emphasizes that speed will never trump relevance. Below is a video of Cutts answering this user-submitted question: “Since we’re hearing a lot of talk about the implications of Page Speed, I wonder if Google still cares as much about relevancy? Or are recentness and page load time more important?”
Cutts says, “No. Relevancy is the most important. If you have two sites that are equally relevant (same backlinks…everything else is the same), you’d probably prefer the one that’s a little bit faster, so page speed can be an interesting theory to try out for a factor in scoring different websites. But absolutely, relevance is the primary component, and we have over 200 signals in our scoring to try to return the most relevant, the most useful, the most accurate search result that we can find. That’s not going to change.”
Of course, don’t take page speed out of the picture. Increasing your site’s speed will be beneficial for you in the long run. As expected, Cutts did not specify exactly where page speed stood among the 200 factors. It would be smart, when working with your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, to analyze and test what factors are most important to both Google and you. As you develop your website, think about the future and try to integrate page speed and user relevance for a better overall user experience.
If you are looking to increase your page speed, Google offers a list of tools developed by Google and third-party developers to help increase the speed of your page.
Written by Chris C.
