It's part of the algorithm, but it's not enough to offset the fact that a bloated site like weather.com gets astronomical amounts of traffic from all sources (d

It's part of the algorithm, but it's not enough to offset the fact that a bloated site like weather.com gets astronomical amounts of traffic from all sources (direct, paid, organic). It's more like if you had two sites with identical traffic and identical content relevancy the faster site would rank higher... which makes sense. If your site is incredibly popular, it's logical to think that people are finding it useful and therefore it should rank higher. That's less true than it used to be, but it's still valid as one of the primary ranking metrics.