Google expands its core web vitals and page experience update FAQs

credit: Barry Schwartz

Google explained it “will continue to prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar.”

Google updated its FAQs around the Core Web Vitals and the page experience update. This page is accessible in the Google support forums and was initially posted in December 2020 but was updated today with a lot more details.

What is new. Quite a bit has been updated compared to the original version. You can compare the old to the new by scanning both documents. Malte Ubl, Technically a Software Engineer at Google, said on Twitter, “We published an FAQ on Google’s page experience ranking answering questions like: Where does the Core Web Vitals data come from? How is a score calculated for a URL that was recently published & hasn’t yet generated 28 days of data? …and many more.”

“In December last year, we published a set of Core Web Vitals & Page Experience FAQs based on the questions you wanted us to answer. We received a lot of positive feedback, and many wrote to us saying they found the answers helpful. We are back with more answers to the questions we received meanwhile.  We’ve organized the questions in this post into three sections: Metrics & Tooling, Page Experience & Search, and AMP.  We hope you find these useful,” said Google.

What stands out. The one big item that stands out to me is the one on how Google will still rank the most relevant content despite how poorly it might do with its core web vitals scores. “Our systems will continue to prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content,” Google wrote.

Google also said that those pages are still “eligible for Top Stories carousel if my webpage is not clearing Core Web Vitals.”

Why we care. With the Google Page Experience Update coming in May, we are all getting ready to ensure our sites fair green with this update. We are not sure how big of a ranking factor this will be, but even if this is a small ranking factor, making these user experience changes to your site can help make for happier users and potentially increase site conversion rates and performance.

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