Here’s what Google’s Matt Cutts has to say on the issue:

“Historically we haven’t used it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast, it should be a good experience and so it’s fair to say if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus, or if you have an awfully slow site, maybe users don’t want that as much.”

Google already considers page load times as part of the AdWords quality score, so it’s a logical step for this to be included in organic listings too.

While it’s unlikely to have a huge impact on rankings (there are over 200 other factors) it would be worth preparing for its introduction ahead of time and get your site loading as fast as possible. Here are a couple of tools which can help you get started:

• Google’s Page Speed Tool – This is a firefox plugin from Google that enables you to see which areas of your site need improvement.
• WebPageTest.org – Another speed tool which provides optimization recommendations and other interesting stats.

I plan to watch & then post my comments )