David Utter of WebProNews wrote today that Google will soon be including “page load time” as part of their Quality Score criteria.  What that means, simply, is if you run Google Adwords to a page on your site that takes a long time to appear on screen, your ad could be dropped further down the list in Google pay-per-click search results…no matter how much you’re willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad.

I can see the many reasons Google would make this addition.  Think of all those LOOOOONG sales letters that take forever to load.  Think of all those Video sales letters that have to pre-load before you can even watch them.

Well, from a sales standpoint, Google could be shooting themselve in their own foot because those loooong sales pages seeeeeellll!!  And, those big video sales letters are growing more and more frequent…because they convert too.

Google would love to see text-only…and just a paragraph or two would be best.  But, the problem as I see it, as I originally learned this from Simon Leung who was on the original Adwords team at Google, is that Google staff are NOT Internet marketers.  And, the Quality Score criteria they use makes that point obvious.

So, this response to David’s announcement is just a heads-up that you could see your positions in Google Adwords going down over the next few weeks even though you didn’t touch anything.  If so, you better take a look at your page load times and the landing pages used by your competitors.  Because, all things being equal, page load time will be impacting your Adwords positions shortly.

Because that’s how Google wants it.