Google "Page Experience Update" now rolling out

[sk7411]

System: The following 4 messages were cut out of "Core Updates Thread" at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5037667.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 3:16 pm PT on Jun 15, 2021 - (PDT -8)



FYI , Page experience update is now slowly rolling out:...

Google Search Central - Twitter
https://twitter.com/googlesearchc/status/1404886100087246848 [twitter.com]

The page experience update is now slowly rolling out (Top Stories will begin using this new signal by Thursday). It will be complete by the end of August 2021.

More here:
More time, tools, and details on the page experience update
[developers.google.com...]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 11:27 pm (utc) on Jun 15, 2021]
[edit reason] Added context and formatting for links [/edit]

[MayankParmar]

I've yellow and green pages, no red pages. No changes.

[japsec]

Hello guys,

Although I have been following up the forum for a long long time without posting, now I needed to write my first post and ask something...

Google announced early in June that the June update has two parts and the second part would be in July. The first part had already been done recently. Now the question is, do you know whether this page experience update is the second part of the June update or separate one which is independent from the second part of the June update?

[mzb44]

Now the question is, do you know whether this page experience update is the second part of the June update or separate one

It is a separate one and does not have anything to do with the core update.

The second part of the core update is expected to be released sometime in July.

[saladtosser]

Well, a local friends site I do (a painter and decorator) has just been taken over by another local decorator who doesn't have SSL, doesn't have a Mobile friendly (or any mobile site) and CWV scores in the gutter for the first time in a LOOONG time, so they must have pushed something else out (backlink related) else this site would have gone down further not higher IMO (and its not because I'm biased, they have no SSL, no mobile friendly site and CWV scores in the gutter, sincerely)

[ichthyous]

The last two days have been a train wreck for traffic. Today a 50%+ drop in UK and Australia traffic, and traffic to my home page is down 49%...some landing pages down 60%. Meanwhile I gained five top three terms today and impressions are trending higher (still much lower than before the drop on June 1st).

I think that this has nothing to do with CWV as I have zero red pages for mobile. There have been a handful of days with decent traffic in the last five weeks. The reality is, all these changes are designed to kill off our organic traffic for good.

[saladtosser]

My CWV scores keep changing in webmaster tools, even though I havent made any changes, very odd

[yollo03]

I wrote about this before and yes, it's all down to authority. Low authority sites plummeted down the search, stripped off high-volume keywords. There is nothing you can do aside working on your authority, which will take time even if you decide to buy links. You will have to create an exceptionally high quality articles to have a minor chance in earning a good position. High authority sites dont need it, a 500 piece is enough.

I think the core web vitals will mainly affect websites with a specific authority score range, the top sites won't be affected.

[robzilla]

My CWV scores keep changing in webmaster tools, even though I havent made any changes, very odd

How is it odd? Field data changes all the time, just look at your Site Speed report in Analytics.

I think the core web vitals will mainly affect websites with a specific authority score range, the top sites won't be affected.

It will affect all sites, but page experience being only one of hundreds of ranking factors, of course it's going to affect some sites (or queries, rather) more than others. Top sites tend to rank well based on other factors, and CWV is not likely to bring them down, because like HTTPS it has a fairly low weight.

[ichthyous]

...it's all down to authority. Low authority sites plummeted down the search, stripped off high-volume keywords. There is nothing you can do aside working on your authority, which will take time even if you decide to buy links. You will have to create an exceptionally high quality articles to have a minor chance in earning a good position. High authority sites dont need it, a 500 piece is enough.

@yollo It has always been the case that high authority sites outranked low DA sites. I would agree that sites that are larger in scale are benefiting greatly, but I have also seen sites with lower DA than mine shoot up. I have lost half my top ranking terms, and almost all of the high volume ones since March. I have watched a site with a DA only one point above mine rocket to the top to pass all of the huge sites with higher DA, so this is NOT only about DA. I have watched a couple of others with a lower DA also rise relentlessly for months.

What they do seem to have in common is a lot of articles that they generate on every topic which use the keywords in the url. They add a new page for every single topic, repeated over and over. Whereas my home page used to rank on these searches but now lost half its traffic on a daily basis because the traffic is shifting to pages which are "exact match" for the search. If you don't have the exact match you lose the traffic completely. Quality is not necessarily the issue either, because these articles aren't all that great or in depth...just use the right keywords, or sometimes just landing pages with links and a few images and no real article.

I would posit that links are being demoted heavily in this core update. Google is wiping out the value of links for some sites and not others. It may be that if you have multiple inbound links from the same domain the value of the multiple links is greatly reduced...so that a mass of single links each from a different domain are helping sites to rank better.

[edited by: ichthyous at 4:00 pm (utc) on Jun 18, 2021]

[yollo03]

I noticed it as well. Some of my competitors do just that. I think I will take a step back from monitoring rankings and keywords. I will come up with a different approach over the weekend, perhaps it is time to rejuvenate the website. I do it every year in November - December, perhaps it is time to do it again.

I will restructure the pages on the website and add new ones. I am taking a break for a week from following everything but the the website.

[Kendo]

Making changes solely to please Google is a losing strategy.

Hear hear!

[Broaster]

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?

[robzilla]

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?

No need to wonder, all of that is explained in the Search Central blog post that is referred to in the first post here.

More time, tools, and details on the page experience update [developers.google.com]

Of course, that just relates to the page experience update. It's not to say they don't separately look at other signals related to the user experience.

[Robert Charlton]

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....

time to ditch hero images, they look nice sure but they are the worst for lcp

Translation please.

"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 ;)

[mzb44]

"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.

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.

[saladtosser]

>>>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.<<<

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).

>>>I get the thing about CLS, load time, etc. but LCP is just ridiculous.<<<

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!

[edited by: saladtosser at 10:48 am (utc) on Jun 21, 2021]

[mzb44]

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). So in short hero images don't need to be huge/slow just normal image size for mobile devices.

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.

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, go figure!

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.

[saladtosser]

>>>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.<<<

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

[Kendo]

If you are worried about load time and want to use large images, don't load the images for the phone type that is used for speed tests.

Was just a thought.

Frankly, i don't give a damn... with lazyload on large images who cares anymore?

[westcoast]

The web vitals are so insanely disconnected from reality that it is just humorous to me.

And no, Im not complaining about our web vitals personally. We have a 100% green across the board in web vitals and experience because I've always believed in a very efficient design and responsiveness. It hasn't stopped our plummet in any way though.

It does make me roll my eyes though when I take a look at this in page insights:

Amazon ( 43 / 100 ) - RED! FAIL! lol! noobs!
YouTube ( 36 / 100 ) - RED! FAIL! A Google property! Haha
Ebay ( 46 / 100) - RED! FAIL! SORRY EBAY!
CNN ( 12 / 100 ) - RED! FAIL! lol!
MarketWatch ( 15 / 100 ) - RED! FAIL! lol...
Buzzfeed ( 20 / 100 ) - RED! FAIL! oh no...
MSN.com ( 34 / 100 ) - RED! FAIL! Sorry Bill!


Oh, and don't get me started on having GOOGLE Adsense sending me emails trying to get me to place ads above the fold, and then having GOOGLE Search tell me they will penalize me for it. Don't. Get. Me. Started.

Between the spam and idiocy like this Google is doomed.

[Broaster]

So im confused on all this LCP stuff but I put my website in this LCP, FID and CLS, and im thinking I was penalized for a poor Mobile score for LCP, FID and CLS for this June core update? So does this also mean thats why I no longer have articles appearing in top stories as well? because of the update?

www.dunplab.it/web-vitals-tester

My Desktop score is average
Desktop performance: 72

My mobile web vitals score is very low
Mobile performance: 31

I dont even know how to fix this I just use a Wordpress theme from Genesis studio press and im on the dreampress from dream host and use jetpack pro.

Do I have to ask them to fix this or what? Im sorry im just a blogger and I avoid tampering with coding last time I tried I destroyed my wordpress site went blank and error.

[Dimitri]

I do not understand why so many people do not understand that "Page Experience", as well as any other technical related criteria, comes way after "content" and "authority" when it comes to ranking.

[iamlost]

I do not understand why so many people do not understand...

Ah well it is simply business as usual: look back towards the beginning of this thread where I pointed out that Google acknowledged very low weight aka effect of this update followed immediately by mzb44’s

You know very well the opposite of this will happen. Every single ranking change no matter how big or small will for months to come be blamed on the PE update.

Yup.
Déjà vu all over again.

[saladtosser]

"content" and "authority"

You mean content that has links right? There is no authority without links and no links without content but ultimately building authority is just another way of saying building/gaining links?

[Broaster]

They say content is king but I write only original well written content on my blog, spend ours, but I guess without backlinks your content is nothing. Ive seen people rank higher than me or in top stories with some user generated spam article lol

Some article on the top stories bar was a straight up bot spam the title said Streaming FEED !)!)!)!) FREE MOVIE %(#)$#

That was the title and it was on top stories. So if content was king how did a spam article rank so highly.

The hard part is nobody wants to link back to my content they will basically post my article but not link back, I saw one of my articles posted on a subreddit for cars and the person posted I wont link back because its just a small blogger

that gutted me its like they dont want to give any links for smaller bloggers, my blog been around 10 years. I guess I gotta start paying for backlinks service SEO person or something? Just putting out content and hoping it organically gets backlinks is a lost cause cause even though im in google news the people refuse to give me backlinks and instead just steal my content so smaller sites like myself cannot gain much authority.

Even during Covid I traveled to cover stories locally and then saw some blogger with higher ranking basically rehash my story but instead of linking to me he just mentioned my site as accreditation no link back. Yet he linked back to bigger websites like Car and Driver and Time Magazine, but for me they never do, is this a way of eliminating a possible competitor by not giving them links?

[robzilla]

The web vitals are so insanely disconnected from reality that it is just humorous to me.

They're not based on "reality" as you describe it, that would be pointless. But they're very much connected to another reality, in that they represent an ideal that's based on how people actually interact with and react to web pages. That's the true reality. It's a standard we should strive to meet for the simple reason that the science and data tell us that people have, for example, a limited supply of patience while waiting for a page to load.

The fact that YouTube, CNN, Amazon, etc. don't meet that standard has no bearing on the validity of the standard. Ideally, all those sites should be faster, but obviously they continue to rank well due to many other more important factors. And for those companies there are likely other things that outweigh page speed in terms of business priorities; for Amazon, obviously the #1 concern would be sales, and at some point improving page speed may come at the expense of that.

More information: The Science Behind Web Vitals [blog.chromium.org]

[Kendo]

They're not based on "reality" as you describe it

Nor is it related to PageSpeed Insight it seems.

CLS is high if an image loads and pushes the text down the page, which is something that will happen on almost every news site and sites displaying items for sale. The use of "lazyload" on images that has been recommended for SEO in the past may now be penalized by this new BS rating.

But it looks like they are only applying Core Web Vitals (CWV) to sites of high traffic volume because when I look at the ratings of 30 sites I only see a rating for 4 of them. To evaluate the other sites I had to use Page Speed Insight (PSI). I was hoping to compare the different CMS because my 5 main sites are a home rolled CMS, Drupal, Joomla, Moodle and WordPress.

The home site is bootstrapped by me and PSI = 91 although the pages contain a lot more info, images and side column ads. However Page Experience rating is poor.

The other 4 CMS are much the same content as they are basically demonstrating plugins that I provide for those CMS. But because they get fewer than 200 visitors per day they are not rated for Page Experience at all. However their PSI varies:
Drupal = 89
Joomla = 66
Moodle = 72
WordPress = 77

It is interesting to note that before running those tests that I predicted the results based on my experiences with coding for them. It also confirms that a home rolled CMS (PSI-91) can be very much more efficient... most pages on the home site contain 400% more info and images.

Despite the 4 out of the box CMS having low PSI ratings their Core Web Vitals are excellent.

Is that mind boggling or just more smoke and mirrors?

[Dimitri]

CLS is high if an image loads and pushes the text down the page, which is something that will happen on almost every news site and sites displaying items for sale. The use of "lazyload" on images that has been recommended for SEO in the past may now be penalized by this new BS rating.

A good web dev uses place holder ...

[Robert Charlton]

I think that Google and others are in part relying on open source development to move the state of the art forward.

Google has stated the issues which it feels need to be fixed, knowing that there are technical problems yet to be solved. The updates must happen in stages to allow pause and review of where the state of the art is.

In some cases, resolution might come from innovations from the open source community and consensus among browser makers and developers. These are well-known problems, and by prioritizing the issues, Google is using its klout to speed up solving them.

That is, in fact, how some problems like responsive images have gotten resolved. Obviously, too many ongoing changes can create chaos... As I've observed it, the governing bodies of the web and open source communities are coordinated and participating.

Here's an example of the kind of development that has been happening to solve multiple problems at once... in this case to minimize page shift while speeding up loading of external fonts...

A New Way To Reduce Font Loading Impact: CSS Font Descriptors
Barry Pollard - May 25, 2021
[smashingmagazine.com...]

QUICK SUMMARY - Web fonts are often terrible for web performance and none of the font loading strategies are particularly effective to address that. Upcoming font options may finally deliver on the promise of making it easier to align fallback fonts to the final font.

PS: Coincidentally, Dimitri had posted his comments above while I was still posting, and we are talking about similar issues. As he put it...

A good web dev uses place holder ...

In this case, they're improving the place holders, by adding font specifiers, which will assure that replacement by custom fonts will happen more smoothly.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Sites launched in May/June that had started getting Google impressions but no clicks yet(too low in rank) got hit with this update, many with the Google impressions cut in half or more.

Take from that what you will.