• by Derek Gordon , August 1, 2011

One important measure for SEO is the speed at which your site loads. Google looks at this measure, among many others, to help determine your site's ranking. Many small and mid-size websites struggle with this because they don't have the internal know-how to manage site load times, so they often inadvertently bulk up load times when adding tracking codes and advertising units and everything else modern websites seem to demand.

Google introduced a new service last week that could simultaneously address the load-time problem for SMBs  -- while also raising questions about the objectivity of Google's natural search rankings. It's called Google Page Speed Service. 

Here's what the company says about its new service: "Page Speed Service is an online service to automatically speed up loading of your Web pages. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying Web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google's servers across the globe." 

Google says it will guarantee improvements of between 25% and 60%. Which is a lot.  The company also says that this service will be free initially to a limited number of users (you can apply here), but eventually there'll be a market-rate fee.

But that's where I get concerned. If I pay Google to essentially vacuum my Web site, replicate it, clean it up and improve its speed on Google servers, I can then see my natural search rankings improve.  While I should expect to see my rankings improve no matter how I might improve my site's load speed, Google now has an additional financial incentive to make my rankings better. The new offering raises thorny "pay to play" questions that already dog search engines on a number of other fronts.

There are other services that essentially do what this new Google service proposes to do, including CloudFlare and Incapsula, but, of course, they don't also provide the search engine they're optimizing for.  Moreover, it's one more way in which Google can control your total digital footprint. If your publishing concern or business runs on Google Apps and your site is essentially hosted and optimized by Google, it kind of own you. 

"Now you don't have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, [and] gzipping resources," Google says. 

Sure. But what must I worry about? And just how much will I have to pay over the long term to ensure my Web site can be found in Google's "natural" search results?  If I throw in big PPC spends, what will that get me on the organic search side?

Google's success with users has been built on the trust that search results are, relatively speaking, pretty darn objective and focused only on getting you to exactly what you're looking for, fast.  Anything that smacks of pay-to-play can erode that trust, just as fast. Moreover, small and growing businesses are already bewildered by what is required of them to be able to rank for their most important keywords because of the not-completely-clear way in which Google advises them to construct their websites.  Many would love to just slap a few dollars on the table to make the problem go away. 

While I'm sure Google is happy to take those dollars, making the problem go away could create new ones that serves no one.