At Brighton SEO today, Gary Illyes, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, was talking about mobile and the upcoming mobile friendly ranking signal which will come into play on April 21st.  Many SEOs have been emphasizing page speed rather aggressively when it comes to ensuring sites are mobile friendly before the 21st.

At SMX West earlier this year, Illyes mentioned the page speed factor, but only that it was using the desktop speed values and not mobile.   So SEOs working on ensuring a site is mobile friendly by the deadline won’t need to also emphasize getting the desktop page speed down at the same time.

But it is important to not forget that site speed is already a general ranking signal, dating back to a Google change in 2010, which Matt Cutts also wrote about at the time.   So while it is already a ranking signal, it appears it won’t be additionally applied to the mobile ranking signal as well.

That said, there is always the possibility that this could be changed in the future, and mobile page speed (as opposed to the desktop page speed) could become a factor in the future.

Regardless of whether page speed is a signal for the mobile friendliness change or not, webmasters should always be looking at their page speed and trying to improve it.

Added: Gary seems to be implying we will see this change in the future, exactly as I predicted…