As expected, on Friday Google officially announced that they’re now using web site speed as a ranking factor in their algorithms.

The announced came via a webmaster central blog post by Armit Singhal and Matt Cutts.

In the post they explain that the change to the algorithm was made a few weeks back and they don’t expect it to affect many sites (fewer than 1% of queries).

The reason given for the change is to improve the user experience and also reduce operating costs.

Check out our post over at SEOMoz for advice on how to improve your site speed for SEO.

 

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