What will the impact of high latency network connections have on the Digital Plymouth Project and the local economy, find out here?

Google’s Matt Cutts hinted this past week that Google is considering using a site’s speed as part of the algorithm that ranks the order of pages in its search results.

Fast sites might rank higher, while slower-loading sites might suffer. It’s a proposal that’s proving controversial.

To quote from Cutts’:

“We’re starting to think more and more about should speed be a factor in Google’s rankings?

…A lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast, it should be a good experience; and so it’s sort of fair to say if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. Or maybe if you have a really awfully slow site, users don’t want that as much.”

UPDATE - 08th December 2009

Google have just launched Site Performance, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster.