After the chatter around Caffeine's arrival prompted speculation that page load speed could become a factor used by Google to rank search results, software engineer Matt Cutts has put the record straight in his latest video.

In it, he responds to a user query centred on the importance of page load time and "recentness" compared to a website's content relevancy. Cutts emphasises that the latter remains the most important factor in Google's search results, though he acknowledges the pertinence of a given website's load time.

"If you have 2 sites that are equally relevant (same backlinks … everything else is the same), you'd probably prefer the one that's a little bit faster, so page speed can be an interesting theory to try out for a factor in scoring different websites," he remarks.

"But absolutely, relevance is the primary component, and we have over 200 signals in our scoring to try to return the most relevant, the most useful, the most accurate search result that we can find. That's not going to change," he continues.

Caffeine, the updated version of Google's "search architecture", increases the speed at which the engine can index website content, which is what led analysts to suggest webmasters "help their sites along" by making them as fast and user-friendly as possible – within reason – while maintaining content relevance.

At the end of last year, Cutts also hinted in a video interview for WebProNews that speed could make its way into the engine's natural search algorithms: "It's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a small bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much."

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