There has been yet another unconfirmed Google algorithm update today.
While not quite on the same scale as other updates from last week, this is still significant.
Tools and industry chatter indicate rankings and traffic are still in flux, but this update is not yet confirmed.
Please find below the industry discussions taking place over on WebmasterWorld.com:
Im screwed I no longer appeared in top stories when I would search a title, turns out google had a core update and now this page experience update that I had no clue and now all my traffic is gone, it sucks and I was just starting to get some traffic now im back to square one again.
Also I noticed a few months ago none of my articles appear in Google DISCOVER anymore, Discover was featuring my articles like crazy and then for a good 6 months it stopped.
putting in so much work writing articles only for these updates to knock you back, and I follow all rules, no back link building, none of those. I even closed or censored comments to avoid any violations on hate speech.
I wonder what they are looking for with this new page experience update, is it going off site speed, the layout, the user experience like how many ads, how may pics, etc?
Some questions that haven’t been answered….
RedBar…. on June 16, we were posting at the same time, and I missed this question of yours….
“Hero images” were large, beautifully photographed images of either products or of people using products that occupied most of either the home page and/or main category pages of many corporate and ecommerce sites, maybe 10 years ago.
Heroic in size, they could be very impressive but slow to download… and they dropped out of fashion, as I remember, when mobile came in. Armed with that info (if you haven’t figured it out already), you should be able to read my June 16th post and make sense out of it.
Also… you and Broaster might need a further explanation about what saladtosser meant by “they are the worst for lcp” in his comment. “lcp” (aka “LCP”) is “Largest Contentful Paint”, one of the three main “signals” that Google is using to assess page loading.
If anybody’s lost at this point, and Broaster appears to be saying that he is lost, I’ll try to provide in another post a few more links and explanations about what’s going on…. Google’s gone to unusual pains to document this well… Like, you aren’t in Gmail anymore 😉
It seems like we are going backwards in regards to web technology and website architecture.
It all started in the 90’s with bare-bone HTML and basic pure text websites and then gradually evolved into including beautiful images, animations, interactive features, videos etc.
Now we’re back to bare-bone HTML and pure-text, as otherwise nothing would pass Google’s forcibly imposed opinion on what a “correct” website should look like. Add just one image above the fold, even if just a few kb, and the majority of sites will not pass CWV.
Edit: I get the thing about CLS, load time, etc. but LCP is just ridiculous.
Do you think this is still the case with recent developments such as srcset, .webp (with fallback to .jpg) and the ability to preload images above the fold via meta tags?
I use these 3 methods with my hero images with srcset from 200px to 2000px (20 versions in total plus minimise both .webp and .jpg fallbacks).
In short my hero images are as big as any other image on my page for mobile devices (2.85kb to 80kb depending on the screen mobile to desktop size via srcset).
Agree LCP is way to strict, I tested removing all images above the fold (excluding the logo) and google highlighted my first paragraph as the LCP and it still failed, well was in yellow not red, go figure!
It doesn’t always solve it. I did all he above for 15-20kb images and it still didn’t fix it.
Nothing short of completely removing any image element above the fold helped.
Haha, yeah, been there. I always laugh a little when it shows a page that doesn’t pass LCP and it highlights a one sentence paragraph on a site with 50ms ttfb and ~300 ms total load time.
Agree it doesn’t ever solve it in CWV, at all! I said before maybe we should just revert to adding content as .txt in the future, you would think mobile technology/speed was going backwards, googles about 5 years 2 late worrying about this metric IMO (i do understand anything over 3 seconds but 2.5?)
mzb44 you know the really crazy thing? Test a google SERP on PageSpeed Insights (that includes any images, which is most) and they don’t even pass all LCP in green, so even Google cant meet the standards they have set out, cray cray! If googles LCP is 2.5 s then 2.5 s is good enough for our sites surely
What’s Up With the Latest Google Algorithm Update?
While most people are still talking about the page experience update recently released, here’s what we know so far:
- It is still unconfirmed;
- Semrush Sensor shows 5.9 (indicating a medium-sized update);
- Mozcast is above average; and
- Industry chatter is also still going strong.
As always, we’ll continue to report on all of the relevant facts as they are discovered.
