A Google Webmaster Help thread has reports of page load time speeds spiking up to ridiculous numbers in the new Google site performance reports. Google’s response to these reports was pretty interesting, I’ll get to that soon, firs the context.

A Top Contributor in the forum wrote:

Now a Googler with the code name “sreeram” replied saying:

The 83s number is bogus. Your site’s toolbar traffic dropped by more than an order of magnitude in the last few days. You should ignore the average for now. We’ll soon be showing site owners some indication of how trustworthy the numbers are, so you can decide when to ignore it and when not to.

Not all URLs may have toolbar traffic, so it’s possible to have many URLs indexed, and even visited by users, but only a couple may show up on Site Performance. In addition, when there’s very little data for a given URL, we won’t display it (for privacy reasons), though it will be included in the overall site average.

So in this case, the site’s traffic as seen by the Google Toolbar dropped significantly, which caused a weird spike in the webmaster’s site performance reports. Thus, Google promised to provide an “indication of how trustworthy the numbers are” in this report.

Clearly, some of these numbers are not trustworthy, such as factoring in Toolbar fluctuations or Google Analytics speed.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: John Mueller from Google sent me a note about this: