Matt Cutts said something interesting, in an interview the other day. He said that there is some lobbying going on, to introduce an additional factor into Google’s algorithm; site speed.
Why?
Well it’s simple really. Think about it, if a web-page loads too slow, the surfers will most likely hit their back button and no page is loaded, and of course, no ads either. However, I do not think that you will need to purchase dual geo distributed servers and dedicated bandwidth, just yet, if ever. My best guess is that Google will not implant site speed into their algo, not as an important factor anyway.
Google are much smarter than that. By insinuate it, they know that hordes of webmasters will start to look over their websites and make sure that they load at optimal speed, just in case, which will give Google exactly what they want, faster sites and more ad impressions, without the hassle of messing around with their algo.
Clever and simple!
Nevertheless, something that I think they would considering adding, which would be both fair and useful, would be to just show the average loading speed, next to the search results. That way the surfers could decide for themselves, if they would like to visit the site or not.
Anyway, I don’t think that we’ll need to be frightened that Google would drop your site, just because it takes over 10 seconds to load, not in the near future anyway. What I do believe, on the other hand, is that if you make sure that your website loads as fast as possible, you’ll get more visitors, or what do you think?