Does speed affect rankings?

[Zipster]

Hi,

On Friday last week (18/11) our main 2MB SDSL line fell over and the back-up 128K ISDN line took over, during this period our site was quite slow and our ISP didn't get it fixed until this morning.

I've had a look at certain search phrases in Google that we have been on the front page for months (I checked last week too and we was there).

Looking this morning we have been moved to the second page!

Is the speed of the website a factor in SEO?

http://www.k.abbott.btinternet.co.uk/

 

[ChrisHirst]

If the page/site was down or didn't respond when the bot visited it can have an effect.

If it was the cause, it will recover on the next crawl/indexing

Chris.

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