Google punishes AdWords advertisers with slow loading pages

Google recently announced that they have begun factoring page load times into quality scores for keywords in their AdWords program. What this mean is that advertisers with slow-loading landing pages will pay more per visit they receive via their AdWords ads.

Without sounding too much like a socialist, this is good for the web. Encouraging website stakeholders to build lightweight, quick-loading sites is often tricky — getting proportionately harder the farther removed the stakeholders are from the build process. This move by Google speaks in a language these stakeholders understand most clearly — the bottom line.

It’s only a matter of time before Google starts penalizing sites’ PageRank (a measure of a site’s ranking within their search engine) for slow-loading, poorly-optimized pages.

Can I get an amen?