Google Search Will Start Ranking Faster Mobile Pages Higher In July (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Google today announced a new project to improve its mobile search results: Factoring page speed into its search ranking. As the company notes, page speed "has been used in ranking for some time" but that was largely for desktop searches. Starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches on Google as well. In November 2014, Google started labeling sites as "mobile-friendly" to denote pages optimized for phones. The company then spend the next few years experimenting with using the label as a ranking factor, ultimately pushing those changes in April 2015 and increasing the effect in May 2016. The label was removed in August 2016 as the company noted that most pages had become "mobile-friendly." Google now plans to wield that power again to make mobile pages load faster.

Comments

Another step

[Anonymous Coward]

Just another step toward Google's attempt to control behavior on the internet.
They pretend to be a search engine, but are now filtering the results based on what they think you SHOULD be looking at, rather than the content. When I ask for a search term, I want accurate results about the term, not about how fast a page loaded.

I miss 2003 Google. How did things go so wrong?

Of course

[93 Escort Wagon]

I’m sure web pages which are slowed down because they include lots of Google ad content will not be penalized...

Re:Why is speed important?

[MetalliQaZ]

Because this will drive sites to use AMP, which gives Google more control.

It's how we get JS bullshit everywhere

[Actually, I do RTFA]

That's because the finished loading your entire 60kb page before it responded to the first paint command, maybe 100ms. A modern page loads a single pixel and a script that loads the rest of the page. Sure, it takes like 3 times as long to get the page, requires people to load 3rd party javascript (or any JS), lets Google track you (although that's part of the plus for them.)

It's also, obviously, letting them pimp AMP and punishing the people who decline to use it.

These are google AMP pages

[goombah99]

saying "faster" to google means ones that return AMP pages to the google spider. This is just googles way of saying it will punish sites that don't use it's walled garden.