Google’s Speed Update turns Site Speed into a Metric for SEO; Rolls Out July 2018
Webmasters and owners should start preparing for the next salvo of updates from Google for their SEO as its been announced that the Speed Update is officially happening and its nearer than what you expect.
Take note that this will affect mostly rankings FOR mobile searches and that the Speed Update will only hit a small percentage of queries. But since we all run websites that work for both desktop AND mobile, this is something we all need to consider. Apart from the announcement of the update, they also gave a deadline for fixes on website speed and that would be July 2018.
The search engine conglomerate suggests that webmasters and admins try online tools such as the updated PageSpeed report to track and monitor website speeds on mobile format.
A screenshot of Google’s speed tester
Here’s a quote from Google’s Zhiheng Wang and Doantam Phan:
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’s been hammering on the fact that page speed was a ranking factor for desktop exclusively. Now they’ve changed their collective minds and will start using the Google Speed Updates to measure mobile page speeds, which I think is a good thing because there are a lot of websites that grow tremendous business from mobile users especially here in the Philippines (except for the god-awful free data stuff).
So again, just to highlight:
- Google Update will be used specifically to measure MOBILE page speeds.
- Rankings for desktop will still remain, while rankings for mobile SEO will change because of this new update
- If you have good content on your website, SEO will still work even if you mobile pages crawls like a turtle on a hot summer day
- There’s no way (at the moment) for you to track whether your site’s affected. It won’t even appear in the Google Search Console, let alone get a notification
