Remember the hangout that I covered yesterday where Google's John Mueller said that really slow sites may not be labeled as mobile friendly? Well, he also said that when the mobile first index launches, Google probably won't be looking at the page speed of your mobile site as a factor.
As you know, Google does look at desktop page speed but not mobile page speed because it crawls the web as a desktop useragent. That is changing with the mobile first index, Google is going to crawl the web from a mobile useragent.
I assumed that when the mobile first index launched, that they would flip it and use the mobile page speed and not the desktop page speed. I may be wrong.
John Mueller said in the hangout at the 20:50 mark that at launch, it probably won't take into account page speed.
Question: Will mobile site speed effect desktop ranking?
Answer: I think at the moment we don't take speed into account for mobile. So that something like into to figure out like how we can best do that but at the moment I don't think we take that into account all.
Question: You don't take speed into account on mobile rankings but you do on desktop rankings?
Answer: No, we don't take the speed from the mobile sites into account.
Question: But that's gonna flip. So you will?
Answer: I don't think we'd be able to do that from the beginning. That's a good point though. Maybe we should clarify that somewhere.... But for the most part in the same way that we use speed for desktop i don't see us doing that in the beginning. That's something we would like to do in the long run but not in the beginning.
Here is the video embed:
Interesting, don't you think?
Forum discussion at Google+.
