Google’s Latest “Speed Update” Wasn’t A Game-Changer

Page Speed

Page Speed

Ever so often, Google releases a major algorithm update that’s designed to shake up the SEO community and have website managers fret over the loading speed of their sites. As with every update, it has the potential to shake up a lot of businesses, as we are never exactly sure how they will affect traffic and what the details are. Google is notoriously secretive about their algorithm.

The most recent update that was designed (we thought) to give preference to faster loading sites over slower sites, has hardly affected the search results. According to Link Assistant, the top 30 positions for over 33,500 queries across 1 million URLs did not change from before the update went into place.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why did we spend so much time getting the speed of your website as fast as possible and dedicate many hours to lowering your load time? According to the findings from Link Assistant, the optimization of speed DOES have a high correlation to the position in the search engine results pages.

So, this update was more than likely designed to weed out some of the worst offenders in load time. If you were at the top of the search engine rankings, you are still there and can continue to monitor your page speed.