During a hangout, one SEO professional asked John Mueller about Core Web Vitals, and if this could impact a site in the search results overall.
The professional asked John: So they prioritize their high search pages for product improvements, like anyone else would do.
Hypothetically, if they had a subset of pages with poor LCP or CLS, say video pages on the site that aren’t the main, or secondary, or even tertiary search traffic drivers, could a few pages with bad Core Web Vitals actually drag a site down?
John explained that this usually wouldn’t be a problem. He believes that there are two aspects here. On the one hand for Core Web Vitals, Google examines a sample of the traffic to these pages, which is done through the Chrome User Experience Report (also referred to as the CRUX report).
It’s a portion of the traffic to your website.
This means that for the most part, the things that Google will examine the most are the pages that get the most visits.
If you have random pages on the site that nobody ever looks at, and they are really slow, then these will not drag your site down – and the reverse is also true.
If these random pages were really fast, then they would not be pulling your site up either.
Even if it’s a lot of random pages, if they just don’t get much traffic, then Google doesn’t really care about them.
The idea here is that the main things people see should have a good user experience. If most people are seeing a certain portion of your site, then that’s the part that Google would want to focus on.
The other thing is with the page experience update, depending on how much data they have for your site, Google may split it up into different sections. And they try to do that by understanding which pages across a site are similar.
And this can be by type of template, or something like that.
Which means if Google can see a template that is mostly for an e-commerce site, and all the product pages are really fast.
Perhaps they have enough data to look at the product pages separately, then they can have that group of pages be treated on its own.
Then there are different kinds of pages across the site that could have data that’s kind of slow, and they could say “Well, this type of page is slower than the others.”
That’s the second part there.
So long as Google has enough data for the specific page type, then this is likely to be affected by Core Web Vitals and the page experience update.
This happens at approximately the 8:29 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 2 8:29
The second question is for Core Web Vitals, we prioritize our high search pages for product improvements, like anyone else would do. Can a subset of pages with poor LCP or CLS, say only the video pages on the site that aren’t the main or secondary, or even tertiary search traffic driving pages on the site, impact the rest of the site’s overall overall Core Web Vitals score?
So what I mean by this is like, can a group of bad pages with little search traffic in the grand scheme of things actually impact–you know, yeah, drag the overall score of the site down? And do we need to prioritize those bad pages, even though they aren’t high traffic pages?
John 9:12
Yeah. Usually, that wouldn’t be a problem. So I think there are two aspects here. On the one hand, for the Core Web Vitals, we look at a sample of the traffic to those pages, which is done through I don’t know the Chrome user experience report functionality. I believe that’s documented on the Chrome side somewhere. But it’s essentially a portion of the traffic to your website.
So that means that for the most part, the things that we will look at the most are really the pages that get the most visits. So if you have random pages on the site that nobody ever looks at and they’re really slow, then those wouldn’t be dragging your site down and the other way around as well. If those random pages were really fast, they wouldn’t be pulling your site up.
Even if it’s a lot of random pages, if overall, they just don’t get a lot of traffic, then we don’t really care about it. The idea there is that the things that people see should be kind of, I don’t know, have a good user experience. So if most people are seeing a certain portion of your site, then that’s kind of the part that we want to kind of focus on.
The other thing is with the page experience update, depending on how much data we have for a website, we might split it up into different sections. And we try to do that by understanding which pages across a website are essentially similar. And that can be kind of like by type of template or something like that.
Which means if we can see that all of, I don’t know, like, say, for an e-commerce site, all of the product pages are really fast. And maybe we have enough data to look at the product pages separately, then we can kind of have that group of pages kind of treated on its own.
And if there’s a different kind of page across the site that has enough data that is kind of slow, then we’ll say, Well, this kind of page is more slow. So that’s kind of the second part there. If you have a kind of page that is very slow, and we can have enough data for that kind of page to understand, well, this is just that part of the website, then just that part will be affected by the Core Web Vitals and the page experience update.
SEO Professional 2 11:33
Got it. So it’ll be isolated to the content type. Yeah, or the content template.
John 11:38
Exactly. It kind of depends on how much traffic those pages get.
SEO Professional 2 11:43
Thank you very much.
