Earlier today, our Websearch team announced that we now consider the speed it takes for a website to load when ranking it in Google search results on google.com. As an AdSense publisher and website owner, you may have questions about this change, so we'd like to take a minute to give you more details.

This change is part of our efforts to provide the best possible search experience for our users, as we've found that faster sites create happy users. Our internal studies show that visitors tend to spend less time on sites that respond slowly, and additional recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. For these reasons, we're now taking site speed into account in our search rankings.

Site speed is just one of over 200 signals we use to determine search ranking, and because it's a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. In fact, less than 1% of all search queries on google.com are affected by the site speed signal. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

In general, a website would have to be particularly slow for its ranking to be affected. We look at the time it takes to load all components of a page that contribute to page speed, including images, rich media, and Javascript/HTML/CSS code.

AdSense is built to load ads quickly so there's no need to change your AdSense setup. Even so, we are working to speed up our ads products further. In addition, we also want to give you some suggestions of things you can do on your side, like enabling compression for your site, enabling caching of images, JavaScript, and CSS, and minimizing the size of your JavaScript with Closure Tools.

If you'd like to learn more about speeding up your website, or evaluate your site's speed, we encourage you to look at Site Performance in Webmaster Tools and try developer tools such as Page Speed, YSlow, and WebPageTest.org. Please note that at this time, the only way to determine whether your site has been affected is if you've seen a recent change in your search ranking.

For more information on this change, please visit our Webmaster Central blog.

Posted by Richard Rabbat, Product Manager