Caffeine's emphasis on Faster loading pages

[megaman]

I've heard that google now weighs page load speeds with a heavier weighting when considering your position on the search engines. If that's the case, coding more lightweight pages and sticking as much as you can into your CSS stylesheets would make sense. But has anyone actually been able to measure how much of an effect this has....

If it's as weighty as some people are saying it would make sense to really go though each of your pages with a fine tooth comb an streamlining all the code so that the page's loads as fast as possible....

What's everyone else found so far ?

[Alex]

I do not think so, but of course there is speed limit after which SEs do not load pages.

[cookiemonster]

I read about this too but it goes into the same camp as say using better hosting. Obviously if googles going to rank your page high it needs to be accessible and visible on as many browsers as possible. So yeah it will have some impact but not much. From a usability perspective you should keep an eye on those things anyway

[ryosuzuki]

I don't think this is a big deal, I mean we've always been told about faster loading pages as being perceived as better than slower ones, but I don't think this new emphasis will have any major knock on effect on overall SEO.

If a site is good but just a split second slower to load up I highly doubt it will lose much rankings.