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On a recent post on the Google webmaster blog, Google engineers Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal announced that Google will now be looking at an additional feature when ranking web sites – the speed in which a web site loads.

Google have been hinting for a number of months that the loading speed of web sites was going to get some increased weight in search engine rankings and that developers should ensure that their coding is as efficient as possible if they wish to guarantee high search engine positions.

“You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.”

The blog entry goes on to say ”Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.“

While Google state that the loading speed doesn’t carry anywhere near as much weight in the search engine results as the relevance of the page – if your website takes too long to load then your search engine positions could be in for a hit.