On Friday, April 9, 2010 Google officially announced that it was adding website speed as measured by how a page responds to a Googlebot and page load time as measured by Google Toolbar.

Dotcom-Monitor had an early heads-up that this might be coming while we were at the 2009 Pubcon Conference in Las Vegas with Google’s Guru of Algorithmic Spin Matt Cutts. It was there that Google’s Matt Cutts first noted that there was “heavy lobbying” at Google to add page load times to the Google search algorithm.