The search engine giant, Google, announced today that they will be considering a site’s speed as part of their web search ranking algorithms. For the full article, you can read it here: Using site speed in web search ranking.

Among other things, the article includes references to a few tools that developers and webmasters can use to evaluate site performance and make changes. This is in addition to tools they already provide with their Webmaster Tools.

Not surprisingly, a site’s speed is not weighted as heavily as other metrics, like a page’s relevance. Google says less than 1% of real search queries are being affected by the site speed metrics in their current implementation.

Google is encouraging webmasters to start monitoring performance and make improvements where possible in order to maximize your site’s ranking. My guess is that this could also have a large impact on hosting services. If speed is now a factor in calculating Page Rank, hosting providers that don’t keep up or provide poor speed/bandwidth will start loosing customers to those that do.