Google’s search advocate, John Mueller, said accessibility improvements won’t directly affect a site’s search rankings.
This was explained in a Google Search Central SEO office hour hangout recorded on March 25th.
One of the questions submitted to Mueller asked whether there was a direct ranking advantage to improve accessibility.
The question specifically asks about links that are visually separated from the text content with features such as increased font weight, underline, and color contrast.
Do these types of accessibility enhancements provide SEO benefits?
the answer is Do not – at least not directly.
However, Mueller acknowledged the importance of accessibility and did not rule out the possibility that it could become a ranking factor in the future.
Google’s Mueller on website accessibility
In response to the question of whether there is a direct ranking advantage to improving accessibility, Mueller said:
“No, not really. So I think accessibility is important for websites because if you drive your users away with a website they can’t use, then they won’t recommend it to others.
But it’s not something we would choose and use as a direct ranking factor when searching. Maybe this will change over time. “
If it matters, why not use it as a ranking factor?
Mueller went on to his response saying that Google has no way to quantify accessibility.
For example, what does Google do to objectively assess the accessibility of one website relative to another?
Before using it as a ranking factor, Google had to define what elements made a website accessible and how those elements would compare across different websites.
The core web vitality that Mueller proposed in his response is a set of factors that allow Google to quantify a good page experience.
Something like Core Web Vitals might be created to measure a website’s accessibility. However, there are currently no plans for this.
“That’s where I can imagine what we’re doing around Core Web Vitals and the page experience ranking factor, it’s probably at some point where we can quantify accessibility more, maybe by then we can use that in terms of rankings, But at least for now we don’t have any concrete plans in that direction.”
This is in line with an article we published last year 15 things that aren’t a Google ranking factor.
Because of the importance of accessibility, it’s easy to assume by default that Google’s algorithm has a way to evaluate its search rankings.
Maybe this will happen one day, but until then, it never hurts to make sure your site can be easily navigated by as many people as possible.
See the video below for Mueller’s full response:
Featured image: Screenshot from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, March 2022.
