EQUTE — It makes sense that Google’s upcoming Caffeine update will likely emphasize speed.

Google has already made load time a factor in AdSense quality scores but the purported addition the feature in all Google search is new and could mean big changes to a lot of publishers.

The guys over at WebProNews interviewed Google’s Matt Cutts about the possibility.

Google has a lot of clout on the Internet, obviously, but they cannot control the speed. Matt Cutts said it himself, they want a faster Internet. So this is one way to push site owners to speed things up without hurting sites that can’t speed things up.

Anyone looking to test their site before Caffeine rolls out after the holidays should check out Google’s page speed test. Testing loading speed should be a no-brainer to most site owners, but now it’s even more essential to make sure the site is running on all cylinders.

There has been a lot of speculation about what Google Caffeine will do to search rankings — will it be the Google slap-apocalypse?

Most likely, no.

The people at WebProNews sat down with Matt Cutts from Google to examine the issue. You can watch the video at WebProNews.

His main points were that most people won’t notice a change when Google Caffeine rolls out. He also made a point to say that it would be rolled out slowly and would be tweaked based on user feedback.

At the core, Google Caffeine is only an update to how Google actually crawl’s Web sites, so there should be no quality-score adjustment that could hurt online marketers.

From the article:

This infrastructure modification will lay the foundation for future indexing changes and will also allow for the expansion of website speed and size. Incidentally, it could even provide a stronger architecture for potential real-time and semantic efforts.

Google Caffeine could be laying the framework for the upcoming Google Wave.