I try not to write specifically about Google more than once a week as there’s plenty of other Google oriented blogs out there, but I thought this worth a mention. If you’re an Adwords advertiser and your pages load slowly, you may be paying more for your clicks soon.

A few weeks ago, Google stated that an additional factor will be brought into an advertiser’s Quality Score: landing page load time. Load time evaluations will be added to the Keyword Analysis page very soon and if pages are considered too heavy, an advertiser will have a month to tidy things up. After that time, from what I’ve read around the web, if the problems persist, clicks could cost up the advertiser up to 5% more and Adwords rankings affected.

This not only affects site owners who are advertisers, but affiliates who promote other merchants - they won’t have any control over the load time of the merchant’s pages and may opt to discontinue promoting the merchant. Even if you don’t use Adwords yourself, if you’re a merchant with affiliates using PPC, this is an aspect you may want to bear in mind.

Page load time is something I’ve harped on about many times before - it’s just one of my pet peeves. I have broadband because I want things to load quickly, not so I have to wait the equivalent amount of time just because a designer/developer wants to make use of higher speeds available these days or a store owner decides to try and stick as many items on a page that they can - and without even optimizing the thumbnail images.

You can read the Adwords page load time announcement here. It’s not all that hard to make your pages leaner - pick up some tips on page load time optimization.