Just a quick update to the above post. Matt Cutts was again interviewed by WebPro News on March 8th where there was a little more clarity around Caffeine and Page Speed – Google’s Matt Cutts Talks Caffeine, PageRank, PuSH, Buzz, and Much More

The take-away:
- Caffeine is an infrastructure change
- Page Speed is not part of this change and is rollong out as part of a ranking algorithm change

That’s a very good question. First off I think it is important to note that Matt Cutt’s has tried to clarify this a bit. In a recent article Google Sets Record Straight on Page Speed as Ranking Factor the following was said:

Despite the fact that Cutts never said that page speed would become any more important of a ranking factor than anything else, many around the web and Blogosphere jumped to conclusions. While many more have remained sensible about the concept, not expecting page speed to trump relevant content, Cutts has now provided a video setting the record straight. The video is a response to the following user-submitted question:

Matt’s answer is simply, “No. Relevancy is the most important. If you have two sites that are equally relevant (same backlinks…everything else is the same), you’d probably prefer the one that’s a little bit faster, so page speed can be an interesting theory to try out for a factor in scoring different websites. But absolutely, relevance is the primary component, and we have over 200 signals in our scoring to try to return the most relevant, the most useful, the most accurate search result that we can find. That’s not going to change.”

That being said, SEO by the Sea, had a very nice write up on this exact topic: Does Page Load Time influence SEO? in June 2009. This article does state patents from both Google and Yahoo where page speed and latency are discussed. An excerpt relating to the Yahoo patent:

The patent filing considers much more than just how quickly pages load into a browser, and it may influence more than just the rankings of pages.

Access – How quickly it takes to access a page or other kind of document when sending a request to retrieve a page or document. Measuring access might mean looking at performance characteristics associated with a page such as server performance, and file performance. It might consider how quickly a page might load for visitors at different connection speeds, such as broadband and dialup. A search engine crawling program might simulate connections at different speeds to measure how quickly a page loads for visitors coming to a page through dialup or broadband connections.

At this stage page speed can be an influencing factor and that may also include latency. To what degree, remains to be seen. It is early days; however, as Matt Cutts stated, relevancy is still the most important factor.

Is their anything coming out of Google about how they may or may not deal with latency when measuring page load speed?

Our sites are hosted in NZ it seems that if it is not taken into account our sites may get penalised?