Now we all know that the Google crawler is constantly being edited by Google in order to ensure its search engine is working at not only optimal performance, but also supplying its users with the correct websites for the information requested. However, a recent article has said that Google has been testing loading times of websites and if the load time has been longer than it needs to be then it’s being dropped down the rankings.

Now as with the majority of these kinds of claims its best to wait till se get a real response from Google. However, with Google working on its new form of broadband high speed internet it doesn’t seem too unlikely that they would start testing such things. In terms of what this may mean for users such as yourself, well you may find that overloading sites with ads, unneeded videos and using the old html system rather then xhtml/css may cause you to drop a few places in the rankings, however, unless your sites full of full featured pictures, macromedia flash movies and downloads you should be fine.

If your site is the latter then it would be a wise idea to keep a lookout on Googles website and see if and when an official statement comes out. If you don’t want to wait until it’s already happened then upgrading your hosting to a quicker service is one way to decrease your load time.

If this is not possible then you can always consider changing your theme, offloading videos to sites such as youtube so that they take the bandwidth damage and even offload your images to image sites for the same reasoning. Recently Amazons webmaster section has been allowing mysql database hosting so this could be one way to greatly reduce your load times.