In this hangout, one webmaster was particularly concerned about a new CSS property that was recently added.
The webmaster asked whether the new CSS property, which was just integrated into Chrome, will have such an impactful effect that it’s important to integrate into every development decision.
John explained that the ranking of the page is based on the rendering of the HTML that has already been loaded. He doesn’t see any new CSS property actually doing all that much to a site’s ranking.
He doesn’t know how much of an effect the CSS property will have, but he doesn’t think the effect will be very strong.
Again, it’s all about the rendered source and what shows up when the site loads, rather than a single CSS property.
This discussion occurs at approximately 6:40 in the video:
John Mueller 09/10/2021 Hangout Transcript
Webmaster 2 6:40
John, again, it’s so good to be here. I miss all the Hangouts from last year. But yeah, I have a very important question. And it’s something that I haven’t seen you talk about at all because it’s just very fresh. So I want to know, again, not from a ranking factor perspective, what is going to happen with the new CSS property that you guys just recently integrated to Chrome only browser? So the new CSS property that I can implement to render content better?
John 7:21
I don’t know which one you mean.
Webmaster 2 7:23
It’s the content visibility property that was just integrated recently. Okay,
John 7:32
I thought we’d do anything with it and search.
Webmaster 2 7:36
Okay. I mean, cuz it’s, it just basically, it’s a, you know, it’s all about improving load time, and so on. So I just wanted to know, moving forward, how important it’s going to be to implement it into your site because a lot of developers are having issues. And SEOs, they work together, they’re, they’re having a lot of issues with CSS and JavaScript, those are the two main issues.
John 8:07
Yeah, I don’t think we would do anything special with like new CSS properties, or new HTML tags, things like that, in search there, there are two places where it could come into play, on the one hand, where we render the pages, because we use a modern Chrome browser, that could be something that plays in, but if it’s CSS, then it’s about kind of the, the HTML is already loaded. And the HTML is what we would take into account for indexing. And it’s just a matter of maybe shifting things around on the page with the layout. So from, from a rendering point of view, I don’t see a new CSS property changing anything. It would be essentially like we would still index the content normally.
The other thing that you kind of suggested is with regards to speed. If it is something that affects the speed that users see the content, and then that could play a role with regards to core web vitals. Because for core web vitals, we use essentially the speed that, that users see, the field data. And if users are using a modern word version of Chrome, and they’re seeing pages load faster because the pages are implementing HTML in a better way, and CSS and JavaScript or whatever, then that’s something that will be reflected in the field data over time and we could take that into account through the core web vitals. So that, that kind of, I guess, more indirect effect is something you might see. Whether that has a noticeable effect on most websites with regards to the core web vitals, I don’t know. That’s something, I’m guessing it does have some effect otherwise, the Chrome team wouldn’t have worked on it. But I don’t know how strong the effect would be for the average website.
Webmaster 2 9:57
But I would appreciate calculating and doing all the calculations, it’s just going to be better for, for Googlebot to understand and implementing that.
John 10:08
Now, I don’t think for Googlebot it changes anything. I think, what, what I would do is, if you’re working together with a developer, and you think this property might make sense, or some other new HTML property, implement it on a test page, and test the page with the lab testing tools before and after, and then you can see like, does, does it really make a big difference here? And if it does make a big difference, then maybe it’s worthwhile implementing broader. If it’s a small difference, and like, well, it was an interesting test, but probably not worthwhile to implement across the whole site.
