(Note: I was going to post this as a reply to Matt’s blog post, but his Typo kept on giving me “500 Application Error”. Well, I am now posting it here.)

Stuart Brown wrote about switching to a dedicated server after getting digged, and had experienced (1) much better page rendering time, and (2) more referrals from Google. Thus he concluded speculated:

Perhaps the effects of a quick page response are more important than the rate of spidering — could Google be using this data (site response time) to build a profile of responsiveness across sites? Could this be yet another factor in ranking?

Perhaps — perhaps not. I don’t think page response time is a major factor in ranking quite yet, but with the introduction of this feature in the Webmaster Console, perhaps sites that take a long time to load will see a slow decline in Google traffic?

Here’s my take.

Do note that the correlation between speed recorded in Google’s webmaster console and SERP ranking is all speculation — there is no concrete proof from his end.

Moreover, Matt Cutts has just busted this myth more than a month ago.

It’s fine to run your website off your home DSL, as long as you configure your webserver correctly… As long as Google can load your web pages, it doesn’t really make a different whether the pages load in half a second or 5 seconds.

And I believe any respectable SEO would have read Matt Cutts’ post. In fact I used to have sites ranked very well for some specific keywords on Google back in 2001-2005, when they were hosted on 36kbps PSTN modem (2001-2002) and 128kbps ADSL line (2002-2005) at home.

A fast page load is still important though, which every web users would agree. Your visitors might be turned off if the site does not load in 4 seconds — and that’s including the HTML page, all CSS/JS files and all images. So hosting on a beefy dedicated server + unsaturated bandwidth might not always please the visiting bots, but will definitely keep your real users around more often.

On the other hand, a slow loading site is a sure way to annoy your visitors, including the ones that might potentially link your site.