Having good Core Web Vitals results will not necessarily improve the indexing of your web pages in Google search results.
This was stated by John Mueller, a Google search attorney, during a Google Search Central SEO office hours hangout recently.
A question is asked regarding “basic web basics” and whether the results can affect the quality of a site, and thus affect the number of site pages that get indexed.
Website quality is directly related to indexing, as Google aims to index high-quality content that adds value to the web.
If your site does not meet a certain quality threshold, it may cause your pages to be indexed slowly, or not to be indexed at all.
However, the results for Core Web Vitals are ranking factorsNot quality factors. So raising the scores will not have a direct impact on indexing.
Here is Mueller’s response.
Can Core Web Vitality results affect Google indexing?
Mueller notes that it is difficult to answer this question without looking at a specific website.
In general, since “basic web essentials” and “page experience” are not quality factors, they are not likely to have much impact on indexing.
Mueller says:
“I don’t think so. It’s really hard to look at this without looking at a specific website. But, basically, Core Web Vitals kind of plays into the Page Experience ranking factor – that’s more of a ranking factor. That’s not a quality factor.”
And in particular, it’s not commensurate with the amount of website crawling and indexing we’re already doing. In some cases, there is a bit of a relationship between how fast a page is and how quickly it can be crawled, but it doesn’t have to be that way. So that’s something where these aspects are usually less connected and totally unrelated to each other.”
Mueller goes on to say that good Core Web Vitals results won’t always lead to a faster crawl, either.
In addition to the basic web vitals and page experience factors, there are many other elements that go into how fast a page loads
“So especially when it comes to page experience, because the time it takes to actually load a page depends on a lot of factors — more than just a single request to the server, you might have lines on that page or you might have large images pulled from other sites. All of these things are elements that play a role in how fast the page loads for the user, but don’t actually determine how fast the page can be crawled.
Obviously, if your server is so slow that any request made to the server takes two chunks, that’s something I would say well, your page is going to be slow and Google’s crawling is going to be slow simply because we can’t crawl as much as we’d like. But, for the most part, if you’re talking about some good pages, and the crawl is reasonably fast, I wouldn’t expect to see a correlation between Core Web Vitals results and a website’s crawling and indexing. “
Hear Mueller’s full response in the video below:
Featured image: Piscine26/Shutterstock
