SMF For Free Support Forum

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

Well, check it out. Site speed is now used to help rank websites. They seem to mostly be using it to put pressure on websites to speed themselves up. Though apparently it is a weak metric, meaning it shouldn't be affecting search results in any dramatic way.

Though, can't hurt to speed up your forums though. Sometimes it feels like half of the complaints about slow loading forums comes from people whose forums are badly designed. Allowing your website to have a ton of large graphics on it, large animations, threads with too many pages or heavily nested quotes will slow your forums down.

Sounds like a good thing to me, coming from Google, but being so softly weighted isn't going to change much on the web