Back in November, we started hearing murmurs that Google was considering whether or not to factor site speed into its search ranking algorithm. In a blog post today, the search giant confirms it is now adding site speed to its list of criteria that could affect your Google ranking.

It's another step on Google's long road toward achieving maximum speed and efficiency. The company even launched a Site Performance tool as part of its Webmaster Tools suite to help assess site performance statistics and make changes accordingly. Today's blog post recommends a few other tools for evaluating your site's speed as well, including the Firefox Add-on Page Speed, Yahoo's YSlow and WebPagetest.

The new site speed criterion isn't weighted as heavily as something like page relevance, however. Google says less than 1% of actual search queries performed are being affected by the site speed dimension in the current implementation.

Do you think web site performance should affect search result rankings?