The Google Speed update, which began rolling out on July 9, has reportedly so far had almost no impact on downgrading the ranking of mobile pages in the Google mobile search results in general.
The folks at SEO PowerSuite looked at about 33,500 keywords, 1 million pages of search results and the positions from one to number 30 before and after the update. They came to the conclusion that there hadn’t been any change in ranking, even for many slow pages, a week after the Speed Update was released. The test was run back in April before the Speed Update, and re-ran the results about a week or so between July 14 and July 16.
Each page was graded by speed based on the Google PageSpeed Insights tool, which provides an optimized median FCP and median DCL. First Contentful Paint (FCP) and DOM Content Loaded (DCL) are technical metrics of how to measure the load time of a page, for more details see this page.
The metrics was compared from before and after the release of the Speed Update. In the end, it was concluded that there“no correlation between the position in mobile SERPs and the median FCP/DCL metrics.” They added, “The growth of average FCP/DCL metrics before and after the Page Speed Update has been minor: 0.030 seconds and 0.028 seconds respectively.” Google isn’t going to tell you if a page is too slow it won’t rank well in Google. This way, webmaster won’t be able to look at a singel metric and say that a particular page is so slow that it will be hurt by the algorithm or not.
“Thus, there has hardly been any impact on search results a week after the Page Speed Update,” the SEO PowerSuite team wrote. They told me that there was no change in ranking due to speed after this update.
“The data suggests that there has hardly been any impact on search results a week after the Page Speed Update. There’s no correlation between the position in mobile SERPs and the median FCP/DCL metrics. The growth of average FCP/DCL metrics 3 months before and immediately after the Page Speed Update has been minor: 0.030 seconds and 0.028 seconds respectively. The correlation between the position in mobile SERPs and the average Optimization Score remains extremely high: 0.97. The average score has increased by 0.83 points, meaning that the standards of what separates a ‘good’ site from a ‘great’ site are on the rise,” says Aleh Barysevich, Founder and CMO, SEO PowerSuite.
Google’s plan is to run the test again later in order to see if things have changed in a longer time span from the rollout. But for the time being, there wasn’t a change in ranking in mobile search directly associated with the Speed Update algorithm.