At the PubCon 2009 event for people working in SEO last week Matt Cutts from Google mentioned that site speed might become a ranking factor in 2010.

If a website takes a long time to load Google could drop it down the rankings as the goal for Google seems to be to provide an internet experience for their user that is similar to browsing through a magazine – quick and seamless.  Google, when talking about this, are saying that fast websites could be raised in the rankings rather than slow one’s being dropped down the rankings or penalised for being slow.

Previously we have seen an impact to the visibility of slow websites within Google as the Google Crawler does not seem to like sites that are slow to load and the Crawler only seems to crawl a small number of pages per day on slow websites and as a result getting all pages indexed by Google is a struggle.  If the whole of your website has not been crawled by Google the chances of your site being visible for all possible keyword variations is reduced which will result in less people finding your website.

Site integrity is important to Google and it does make sense that the speed of a site is part of this integrity along with not having broken links or too much downtime.

Google have been working on site speed prior to last week’s PubCon event as they released a site speed checking site to help webmasters monitor the speed of their website and identify anything that is causing the site to load slowly.

Whether or not Google will make speed a ranking factor in 2010 remains to be seen but the fact is that if your website takes too long to load there will certainly be an impact to the success of your website.  A slow website will not only struggle to be crawled by Google but will also put off your potential customers as they will get frustrated and go to one of your competitors websites.

So regardless of what Google do with regard to site speed it is still a good idea to make sure that your website loads quickly so that you have a better chance of converting visitors to your website to sales, rather than losing them.