One SEO professional asked John Mueller during a Question and Answer segment of his hangout about the desktop page experience update.
Their site had a drop in visitors due to poor Core Web Vitals. Now things are back on track, but they found out that the desktop page experience update is now rolling out.
Their main question is: what is the page experience when it comes to desktop and how important is it compared to other ranking factors?
John explained that like on mobile, the page experience ranking factor is something that can give a bit of extra information to Google.
For pages where other factors are clear, and the intent of the page is clear based on query intent, then they may ease off on using the page experience as a ranking factor.
On the other hand, if the content is very similar in the search results page, then using page experience helps Google understand a bit more which of these are fast pages and reasonable pages with regard to the user experience.
Also, Google may factor in which pages are less reasonable pages to show in the search results.
And this situation helps them.
Regarding the desktop page experience rollout, John believes this is going to be a slower rollout again, over the course of around a month, which means you would not be seeing a strong effect from one day to the next.
Rather, you would see this effect over a period of time.
This happens at approximately the 42:20 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 42:20
Well, let’s see. Next one I have here is: my website had a drop in visitors due to poor Core Web Vitals. Now I’m back on track, but came to know that the page experience update is now rolling out also for desktop. What is the page experience or anything to desktop and how important is it compared to the other ranking factors?
John (Answer) 42:40
So like on mobile, the page experience ranking factor is essentially something that gives us a little bit extra information about these different pages that could show up in the search results. And in situations where we have a strong, clear kind of intent from the query where we can understand that they really want to go to this website, then from that point of view, we kind of can ease off on using page experience as a ranking factor.
On the other hand, if all of the content is very similar in the search results page, then probably using page experience helps a little bit to understand which of these are fast pages or reasonable pages with regards to the user experience, and which of these are kind of the less reasonable pages to show in the search results.
And that kind of situation helps us there. With regards to the desktop rollout, I believe this is going to be a slower rollout again, over the course of something like a month, which means like you would not be seeing a strong effect from one day to the next. But rather you would see that effect over a period of time.
You would also already see that in Search Console in the reports for page experience and Core Web Vitals you would also already see that on desktop that everything is red, for example, and that you need to focus on that. So from that point of view, with the desktop ranking change, like with the mobile one, I wouldn’t expect a kind of a drastic jump in the search results from one day to the next as we roll this out. Like at most if things are really bad for your website, you would see kind of a gradual drop there. Let’s see.
And how important is it compared to other ranking signals? I think we looked at that briefly. The other thing I might kind of caution against is kind of the first sentence that you had that your website dropped due to poor Core Web Vitals. I suspect for the most part, websites would not see that kind of a big visible change when it comes to Core Web Vitals, even if your website goes from being kind of reasonable to being kind of in that poor bucket in the Core Web Vitals from one day to the next. I would not expect to see that as a kind of a giant change in the search results, maybe changing a few positions, that seems kind of the right, right change there. But I would not see it as a page going from, I don’t know, ranking number two to ranking number 50, like that, just because of Core Web Vitals. If you are seeing a drastic change like that.
I would not focus on purely Core Web Vitals, I would try to take a step back and look at the overall picture and see what else could there be involved and kind of try to figure out what you can do to improve things overall, rather than just purely focusing on Core Web Vitals.
Because Core Web Vitals are something that does take a lot of work to get right. And it is sometimes hard to get all of these things lined up. But it’s also like I mentioned something which is more of a subtle ranking factor and not like a super strong one.
So it’s something where if you’re seeing strong changes, I would recommend not spending too much time on Core Web Vitals side and rather try to figure out what is the bigger change? Or where’s that coming from for your site?
