Google clarifies the upcoming Speed Update only impacts the ‘slowest sites’

Google clarifies that if you have a fast site, making it faster 'won't change things' with your rankings specific to the upcoming Speed Update.

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With Google’s Speed Update coming sometime this month, I asked Google’s John Mueller to clarify what he meant when he said the update will work at “more of a gradual scale.” In a recent webmaster hangout, he told participants that “the faster you can make your pages the more we can take that into account. And it’s not so much that it’s like it’s too slow or it’s faster.”

That seemed to contradict the original announcement where Google said this update “will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users.” So I asked Mueller about this one on Twitter.

He reiterated the earlier guidance that “this only affects the slowest sites” adding that “those can incrementally improve” but went on to say that “ideally, you’d significantly improve the speed.”

He also confirmed that Google is “still aiming for this month” for the rollout. Mueller also explained once again that “if your site is reasonably fast, tweaking won’t change things.”

So, in short, if you have a fast site, making it faster “won’t change things” with your rankings (at least due to the Speed Update), but if your site is slow, even incremental changes might help.

Here is John’s tweet:

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1014015857628938241

You can listen to John talking about the gradual speed improvements a week ago in this webmaster hangout at the 10:18 mark:


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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