Here’s a snipit from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog:

Friday, April 09, 2010 at 11:00 AM
Webmaster Level: All

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

I’m sure you’ve seen many articles on this subject but up till now you may not have seen one that opens the door to what this really means for you content. Chasing after these types of articles are hundred of other articles telling people they have to be “into” social media to influence their ranking in all search engines not just google. That clearly is true but care must be taken if you value your ranking in Google.

Look at this situation like a waitor might look at the tables he has to serve in the restrarant. If he has 3 tables demanding food that’s fine but increase that number to 10 and perhaps he’ll struggle, may get confused and his quality of service to each customer mightbe impared, slow and unreliable. You site is the waitor, your visitors are your regular customers. Don’t lose them to grab quick profit from a bus load of out of towners.

A new client to us expressed concern that their site is not getting indexed or ranked as high as they would expect. The is no fixed rules to what people can expect from google but we are always happy to investigate any concerns especially if, as in this case, it’s a chance to impress a new client.  This person seemed to have followed all the rules and some, we tweaked their meta tags and changed a few formatting on their front page but it wasn’ till we got the site on google webmasters centre that we found what might be a key problem, a problem that if dealt with might allow our changes to have a much greater effect.

The area we are talking about is site speed. The client had never taken any real notice of this section as he knew his site was fast, he had invested in this hosting and always took care of things like image size. But Google’s speed rating said otherwise and this is what google works on. While the client was looking at their main pages google look at all of them they find. So although the client though this content was, although rich, were slick to come into the browser. They were wrong in Google’s eyes.

Google Webmaster Speed Rates

At sometime they had added a forum to their site, this wasn’t used that much but the client thought by adding things like  forums, facebook and twitter this and that all helped with ranking. Well sure it does for some but when adding things like forums you have to evaluate what it will do to the overall success of your site.

Forums – forums can be a great benifit to a web site, they can keep a hold on customers and increase brand loyalty but they can also sidetrack site owners. Our client wanted to provide a great experience for his forum users and so his forum included many plugins which pulled content from 3rd party source inclding pulling content every ten minuites from rss news feeds.

When a site pulls data from a 3rd party it can have a big impact on speed of page loading and not just that one page. This is far worse when this is translated to a test by places like google. The reason being Google’s bot itself might add to the overhang by accessing more then one page at the same time.  And so the rating Google has may not reflect the real visitor experiance on your forum but if you are chasing ranking it’s Google you have to impress. This is just another area where Google walks people down a path but fails to fully explain the working of their features.

Care must be taken – think long and hard before adding new sections to your site if it depends on google ranking and think even harder on any plugins you may want to use on your forums. The same is true about banners, each external banner adds to the loading time, try to load them from your server. Check what are the external links on your pages – a lot of software applications like shopping cart include external links in their headers and footers. For example they might include the words “Powered By” with a link or a button. Check where this button is being loaded from, if it’s off site download it and load from your because if they have a problem it becomes your problem. Even Google code like Analytics have an impact on your page loading times.