Does page load time affect the organic SERPs?

[guru5571]

I discovered today that <an ad network I use> has been serving pop-unders without my knowledge on my pages. They just posted a notice on their blog that this is something you have to opt out of, yet was never even an option when I installed the code. Anyway these pop-ups had been running for about 2 weeks which really slows down the page loading time and Google traffic has been declining.

Their ads seriously slow down page load times anyway, and that is basically my point. I know that page load times affect quality score of landing pages through Adwords... So my question is:

Do page load times affect quality scores of pages in the SERPs?

[edited by: tedster at 1:17 am (utc) on June 4, 2008]

[tedster]

There's certainly an indirect effect, because Google measures user satsifaction with their clicks. If people come back quickly to the Google SERPs to try another result - beyond expected benchmarks - then that can have a negative effect. There have also been reports here from time to time that server response time problems can negatively affect rankings - but that's still server side and not client side.

Ever since Google held that conference about page load times [webmasterworld.com], I've felt something was up in this area. Improving page load speed is valuable at any rate, even for a site that's not running Adwords or Adsense. So I got more serious about load speed improvements with several client sites - all to good effect.

The information in that conference, including the YSlow tool for Firefox, hit me like a ton of bricks. some of the researched information was completely new to me - but I took it to heart and I'm glad I id.

[guru5571]

Thanks for the link Tedster. I'll check it out. I'm removing all the ads from that particular network, because I've got everything else tightened up as far as linking, dupe content, etc. There is also a definite correlation as to Search traffic taking a hit and the sites that run slow because of these ads.