Google's Speed Factor In Mobile Search Rankings

Google today announced a significant change in how it ranks websites for mobile searches: it will now take page speed into consideration as one of its signals, the company says. The change, which Google is referring to as the “Speed Update,” will go into effect in July 2018, and will downrank very slow websites under certain conditions.

Though speed will become more of a factor in determining the order of search results, the change is not so drastic as to make it the only factor. There will be times that slow pages still rank highly – like when they have the most relevant content related to the search query at hand, for example.

Google says the update will only affect pages that “deliver the slowest experience to users” and it will only affect a small percentage of queries.

Google’s ever-evolving page rank algorithm is notoriously tricky, to say the least. The search giant takes into account a number of factors when assigning page rank, one of which is speed. At least, that’s been the case with desktop searches for some time.
The change will apply the same standard to all pages, we’re told, regardless of the technology used to build the page.

Google’s Zhiheng Wang and Doantam Phan wrote:

The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.

Google is not offering a standalone tool for web publishers to help them get ready for this shift, but did point to a number of resources that can provide general insights about site performance.

This includes the Chrome User Experience Report, which offers user experience metrics for popular web destinations; Lighthouse, an automated tool for auditing site performance and other web quality metrics; and PageSpeed Insights, which shows how well a page performs on the Chrome UX Report and makes suggestions about how performance can be improved.

In fact, mobile searches surpassed desktop searches back in 2015, and mobile has continued to grow in the years since. Though Google hasn’t provided an update on what percentage of its searches are mobile, some third-party reports placed this number near 60 percent last year. Another resource, Statista, says that Google accounted for over 94.4 percent of mobile search market share in the U.S.

These figures mean that mobile has been more important than desktop for several years now, and it’s time for the search index itself to reflect that.

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