During the submitted Question and Answer segment in a recent John Mueller hangout, one SEO professional asked John about Core Web Vitals.
They have a bad CLS score, but they do have good FCP, FID, and LCP scores.
It’s only the CLS score that’s terrible.
John explained that they don’t have anything like a fixed number regarding how strong these scores work for websites.
So it’s really hard to say exactly what the impact will actually be.
However, from Google’s point of view, Google does take these metrics into consideration when it comes to Core Web Vitals and the page experience ranking factor.
And Google does try to look at them overall.
They do try to focus especially on the area where you’re in that ‘reasonable area’ with regards to these scores.
If you’re not in the bad scores section, and you make some improvements to get out of that section, that’s something that Google would consider being reasonable.
John also said that there’s not currently anything fixed within the algorithm in terms of a function that considers ½ of FCP, ½ of CLS, or ⅓ of these Core Web Vitals metrics into consideration.
It’s more like something where they examine the bigger picture.
And it could happen over time, where they change things around a little bit to make sure they are actually treating the page experience of pages properly.
This is especially true regarding page experience, where they make changes from year to year.
John expects that perhaps when Google reviews this, they could potentially pre-announce some other changes or other factors that come into play here.
This is similar to how Google introduced the desktop aspect of page experience, which is coming into play this year.
This happens at approximately the 40:18 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 40:18
Let’s see: how big is the impact on Google ranking if I have a bad CLS score? FCP and FID and LCP have good scores, only CLS is not so good.
John (Answer) 40:31
We don’t have anything like a fixed number with regards to how strong these scores work for websites. So it’s really kind of hard to say, “How bad is it or how big is the impact?” From our point of view, we do take these metrics into account when it comes to the Core Web Vitals and the page experience ranking factor. And we try to look at them overall.
And we try to focus especially on the area where you’re kind of in that reasonable area with regard to these scores. So if you’re not in the, I don’t know what they call them poor or bad scores, that section, and as soon as you’re kind of out of that bad section, then that’s something that we can say, well, this is kind of reasonable.
And we can take that into account. We don’t have any fixed kind of like rankings, or kind of like, I don’t know, algorithmic function, where we say, well, We take one half of FCP and one half of CLS and we take one third of this into account. It’s really something where we need to look at the bigger picture.
And it can happen that over time, we kind of like change things around a little bit to make sure that we’re lagging, or kind of like treating the page experience of pages appropriately. And especially with regards to the page experience ranking factor, that is something where from year to year, we will make changes as well.
So I would expect, I don’t know, whenever they review this, they’ll probably pre-announce some other changes or other factors that come into play here, similar to how we introduced the desktop aspect of that as well. Which we talked about, I think like last year, sometime, and it’s coming into play later this year.
