Google’s Speed Update is going to be released sometime this month and I asked Google to clarify what he mentioned recently in a webmaster hangout where he said the Speed Update works “more of a gradual scale.” “So the faster you can make your pages the more we can take that into account. And it’s not so much that it’s like it’s too slow or it’s faster, ” he said.
That seemed to contradict the original announcement where Google said this update “will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users.” So I asked John Mueller of Google about this one Twitter.
John responded that “this only affects the slowest sites,” he added that “those can incrementally improve” but explained “though ideally you’d significantly improve the speed.” He also confirmed that this is “still aiming for this month” to be rolled out. He also explained once again that “if your site is reasonably fast, tweaking won’t change things.” So in short, if you have a fast site, making it faster “won’t change things” with your rankings specific with the Speed Update.
Here is John’s tweet:
You can listen to where John Mueller talked about the gradual speed improvements a week ago in this webmaster hangout at the 10:18 mark into that video:
About The Author
Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.