A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster worried that Google will be using page speed as a ranking factor in 2010. But the reason he is worried is because the site performance feature in Webmaster Tools shows Google Analytics as needing some speeding up.
The two suggestions this webmaster gets from Google is related to their own product, Google Analytics. The suggestions read:
(1) Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by 15.5 KB: * Go to URLhttps://ssl.google-analytics.com:443/urchin.js (15.5 KB)
(2) The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains: * Go to URLhttps://ssl.google-analytics.com:443/urchin.js
A Googler named sreeram in the forum said it is okay to "ignore the suggestion to gzip urchin.js." Google actually noted this issue in their announcement where they said, "some servers return uncompressed content for Googlebot, similar to what would be served to older browsers that do not support gzip-compressed embedded content (this is currently the case for Google Analytics' "ga.js")."
That response did not satisfy the concern of this webmaster who asked again:
The question is if the speed impact of using these Google products will affect my sites' rankings?I hope not, but I also know if has affected my users experience on my site and that affects me.
Google did release asynchronous calls for Google Analytics, which does speed things up a bit.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
