The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
No, please, do read on. This is a post about what has gone wrong with Core Web Vitals and where we stand now, but also why you still need to care. I also have some data along the way, showing how many sites are hitting the minimum level, both now and back at the original intended launch date.
At the time of writing, it’s nearly a year and a half since Google told us that they were once again going to pull their usual trick: tell us something is a ranking factor in advance, so that we improve the web. To be fair, it’s quite a noble goal all told (albeit one they have a significant stake in). It’s a well trodden playbook at this point, too, most notably with “mobilegeddon” and HTTPS in recent years.
Both of those recent examples felt a little underwhelming when we hit zero-day, but the “Page Experience Update”, as Core Web Vitals’ rollout has been named, has felt not just underwhelming, but more than a little fumbled. This post is part of a 3-part series, where we’ll cover where we stand now, how to understand it, and what to do next.
Fumbled, you say?
Google was initially vague, telling us back in May 2020 that the update would be “in 2021”. Then, in November 2020, they told us it’d be in May 2021 — an unusually long total lead time, but so far, so good.
The surprise came in April, when we were told the update was delayed to June. And then in June, when it started rolling out “very slowly”. Finally, at the start of September, after some 16 months, we were told it was done.
So, why do I care? I think the delays (and the repeated clarifications and contradictions along the way) suggest that Google’s play didn’t quite work out this time. They told us that we should improve our websites’ performance because it was going to be a ranking factor. But for whatever reason, perhaps we didn’t improve them, and their data was a mess anyhow, so Google was left to downplay their own update as a “tiebreaker”. This is confusing and disorientating for businesses and brands, and detracts from the overall message that yes, come what may, they should work on their site performance.
As John Mueller said, “we really want to make sure that search remains useful after all”. This is the underlying bluff in Google’s pre-announced updates: they can’t make changes that cause the websites people expect to see, to not rank.
Y’all got any data?
Yes, of course. What do you think we do here?