As a follow up on our site speed as a ranking signal article from the past days, we havemore information gravitating around the topic, which for some may sound slightly confusing. The information comes from Paul Haahr who is not only an employee at Google, but probably one of the most knowledgeable people around the ranking signals. The main point in his Twitter post was about the bandwidth ranking signal, which as I understood, Google lack at the moment. Here is the exact tweet from Paul:
Google has said mobile friendliness and site speed are important. I don’t think we’ve said anything explicit about bandwidth.
Now, if we get the whole picture Google does use page speed and mobile friendliness, but excludes the connection and bandwidth of the specific device. After all Google does try to speed up pages with AMP and other various methods when the users are accessing it from areas with poor connection. From this Twitter post from Paul we at least understand with certainty, that when it comes to network bars on a phone as a connection speed – Google does understand that this is because of the searcher and not the site itself.