Having a good Core Web Vitals score won’t necessarily improve your page’s indexing in Google search results.
Google’s search advocate John Mueller said this during a recent Google Search Center SEO office hour hangout.
Ask questions about Core Web Vitals and whether the score affects site quality, and therefore how many pages of a site are indexed.
Site quality is directly related to indexing, as Google aims to index high-quality content that adds value to the web.
If your site doesn’t meet certain quality thresholds, it can cause your pages to be indexed slowly, or not indexed at all.
However, the Core Web Vitals score is ranking factor, rather than the quality factor. So raising the score won’t have a direct impact on the index.
This is Mueller’s response.
Do Core Web Vitals Scores Affect Google Indexing?
It’s difficult to answer that question without looking at specific websites, Mueller noted.
In general, since Core Web Vitals and Page Experience are not quality factors, they are unlikely to have much impact on indexing.
Mueller said:
“I don’t think so. It’s really hard to look at this without looking at a specific site. But, at its core, Core Web Vitals is a bit of a ranking factor for page experience — which is more of a ranking factor. It’s not a quality factor. .
In particular, it has nothing to do with how much we actually crawl and index from the site. In some cases there is some relationship between the speed of a page and how fast we can crawl it, but it doesn’t have to be. So this is where usually these aspects are less connected and not fully connected. “
Mueller goes on to say that a good Core Web Vitals score doesn’t always lead to faster crawls.
In addition to Core Web Vitals and page experience factors, there are many other factors that affect how fast a page loads
“So especially in terms of the page experience, because the time it takes for the page to actually load depends on a lot of factors – not just one request to the server, maybe you have fonts on this page, or maybe you have fonts from other sites Large images extracted. All of these are elements that affect how fast the page loads for the user, but don’t actually map to how fast we can crawl the page.
Obviously if your server is so slow that any request to the server takes several parts, then I’d say your page will be slow and Google’s crawl will be slow because we can’t May crawl a lot. However, for the most part, if you’re talking about some pages that are good and are crawling fairly quickly, then I don’t want to see a relationship between the Core Web Vitals score and a site’s crawling and indexing. “
Hear Mueller’s full response in the video below:
Featured image: Piscine26/Shutterstock
