Google says page speed ranking factor to use mobile page speed for mobile sites in upcoming months

Gary Illyes from Google said at the Search Marketing Summit today in Sydney that Google will be updating the page speed ranking factor to specifically look at the page speed of your mobile pages when it comes to the mobile-friendly algorithm.

This report came from Jennifer Slegg, who said Gary Illyes from Google said this is months, but not years away from happening.

The issue today is that many of the ranking signals Google uses today for mobile rankings are based on your desktop web pages, not mobile web pages. So if you have a really fast desktop web page, but the mobile version is really slow, it currently doesn’t hurt your mobile rankings.

When Google updates their mobile-friendly algorithm, they hope to add mobile-specific page speed as a factor and not rely on the desktop version.

As you may remember, page speed became a ranking factor back in April 2010. In June 2013, Matt Cutts hinted that a negative factor would come to slow mobile pages. Then a year ago, Gary Illyes said they are working on mobile-specific page speed, and now, he said it is months away.

But Gary also said on Twitter it is in the planning phase, so hopefully, it is still months away.

It is just logical for page speed, as well as other factors, to be mobile-dependent and not desktop-dependent. This seems to be Google’s plan.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz 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. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.