I just read in an article by David Sims over at TMC.net that Google is going to start throwing a new spice in their secret recipe—and this time it doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of your links or how many spammy keywords you shoved into that tossed content. This time, the new ingredient is nothing less than the time it takes your site to load and respond to users.

It’s an interesting concept, and it certainly makes sense. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve clicked off a website just because I didn’t want to wait for it to catch up with the speed of my laptop. And if you think about it, Google isn’t doing a user any favors by putting a website like that into the top results—no matter how high-quality and relevant the content might be.

To go even further, your slow site isn’t doing YOU any favors either. The speed of a site has a direct and obvious correlation with online sales conversions. If you make oozing through your sales pitch a test of patience, your profits are going to reflect the decreasing length of patience in modern society.

Think about it this way—what’s good for the reader is good for you—that’s typically a good rule of thumb in all cases.

To confirm these claims, I ducked in over at the Google blog. While they certainly are adding in the speed variability, for now it’s like the tiniest pinch of salt the simmering pot. Google writes, “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed…” It also appears that at this time it only applies to Google searches done in English.

But don’t get me wrong—if you ask me, this new flavor is going to get a lot stronger in the future, and by all means, it should. If you want some recommendations on how to prepare yourself for this change, go check out Google’s blog post yourself. Or take a look at Sims’ article to find out how you can start working on your site’s “performance optimization” today.

Or feel free to drop a comment below and tell me how you feel about this development. Is it just one more thing to worry about, or is it the best thing for everyone?