At PubCon in Las Vegas, Matt Cutts updates us on some recent developments at Google. He talks a bit about the impending arrival of the 'Caffeine' upgrade and touches on a new emphasis on site speed as a ranking factor. From the sound of it, speed is going to be a huge factor in SEO moving in to 2010.

A number of people within Google consider speed to be very important to the web, as such we will likely see load speed take on increasing importance as a ranking factor.

According to Cutts, speed hasn’t played a role in rankings in the past but apparently they will in the future. Watch the video for more details about Caffeine and Google’s resources for helping webmasters improve site speed.