Google’s Latest Tool Identifies Page Speed Issues

There has been plenty of talk about just what signals Google is using for search placement. What are the social signals? Will +1 play a role? Honestly, since SERP’s can be so different for every searcher you always have to wonder these days, right?

Well, one SEO signal that has received some attention in the recent past is the speed with which a page loads. Google has always rewarded sites that are coded cleanly and load quickly because it is important to user experience of that page. Another result of a ‘clean’ page is the page loading quickly.

To help measure this element Google has introduced its Page Speed Online tool, which is described in their Webmaster Central Blog.

At Google, we’re striving to make the whole web fast. As part of that effort, we’re launching a new web-based tool in Google Labs, Page Speed Online, which analyzes the performance of web pages and gives specific suggestions for making them faster. Page Speed Online is available from any browser, at any time. This allows website owners to get immediate access to Page Speed performance suggestions so they can make their pages faster.

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Here is a screenshot of the results page (it’s a bit hard to read and we apologize). The results are broken into high, medium and low priority and there is an option to look at the page as it relates to mobile as well.

So I’m just going to take a wild guess and say that while it may not be the most important factor in ranking pages it must mean something to Google if they are providing a tool to measure, diagnose and help improve a web page’s speed.

Your thoughts?