The move could encourage media owners to host their websites on faster servers to ensure they rank highly on Google.
Google’s Matt Cutts unveiled the company’s proposal at last week’s PubCon in Las Vegas, where page loading time was included in a list of ‘what to expect in 2010.’
Cutts explained that page loading time is already a factor in AdWords  advertising searches, and that there is a strong push to make speed a quality factor in Google’s organic search ranking algorithm.

However, there are currently more than 200 ranking factors being taken into consideration by Google’s search algorithm, and the system is only expected to punish webpages that take an excessive time to load – around 20 seconds or more.

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source : netimperitive