Speed Affect on Search Rankings

I have been reading a bit recently about how speed is going to become very relevent in search engines results. And I do no mean merely the speed of the web server/site. Speed to me means two sepearte things. Both the speed of the site, and the speed which you can get your article/posting/page listed in search results.

##1. Page Speed

I have been recently working on getting a few of my sites running quicker. Apparently Amazon suggests that you lose a 10% of customers for every 100 ms extra that your site takes to load over 200ms. That means that speed is important.

Recent News suggest that it will not be long until Google is including your site speed with your ranking and therefore a bad speed could be a bad ranking. Although I have read that this will affect smaller businesses, as they can’t afford massive web servers or content delivery networks, however, in my opinion it is poorly designed or planned sites that will suffere the most from this, and surely this must be a good thing?

2. Real Time Search Results

Real time searching is a big buzz word at the moment in search. By syndicating twitter/facebook/myspace it is hoped that you will be able to get th most up to date results as a rankinging as well. However, it remains to be seen how exactly it will work. Frankly, it may well work for some search terms (celebrities/news/finance) however be far less appropriate for other search terms. How search engines will cope with this is not yet clear, but I’ll wait and see.