Google’s John Mueller, with a tad of annoyance, posted on Twitter that “lighthouse scores do not affect Google Search.” He then shares a tweet about people cloaking and cheating their lighthouse scores as a scam to trick Google.
Here is John’s tweet:
Lighthouse scores do not affect Google Search.
Doing this kind of user-agent cloaking is a terrible idea – you’re just deceiving yourself. It makes absolutely no sense, and prevents you from finding real issues. If you run across a plugin that does this, report it to the CMS. https://t.co/yCoaYduHU4
— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) August 26, 2021
John wrote, as you can see, “Doing this kind of user-agent cloaking is a terrible idea – you’re just deceiving yourself. It makes absolutely no sense, and prevents you from finding real issues. If you run across a plugin that does this, report it to the CMS.”
Colin Bendell, a Performance Engineering at Shopify wrote:
Code obfuscation is a strong smell that a dev is trying to hide something dishonest, and is likely hurting your business. Fire that team.
More examples of lighthouse UA sniffing that is actually making things slower: pic.twitter.com/G9VkN9ccOx
