In a recent Google Webmasters Hangout, Google’s John Mueller said that the new mobile index wouldn’t take page speed won’t be a factor in the algorithm.
As Search Engine Roundtable pointed out in their article, Google looks at desktop page speed and not mobile as Google crawls a website with a desktop user agent, but most of the SEO community assumed that this would flip once the mobile first index rolls out in the next few weeks.
Here’s the audio transcript from the hangout
Question: Will mobile site speed effect desktop ranking?
Mueller: 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?
Mueller: No, we don’t take the speed from the mobile sites into account.
Question: But that’s gonna flip. So you will?
Mueller: 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.
