Google's John Mueller pointed out an important fact that I see a lot of folks in the industry misunderstanding around core web vitals. Googlebot does crawl the web and brings in most of the signals Google uses to rank your pages, but the core web vitals do not come from Googlebot or crawling, it comes from the Chrome CRuX field data report.
That means, Google uses real Chrome usage data to bring in data around the core web vitals about specific pages. That includes the LCP, FID, and CLS scores. Googlebot crawling is not the source Google is getting this data from. Chrome usage, a person visiting your site on a Chrome browser, is where Google is getting this data from.
Previous news:
SEO and Google News Update - March 2021
SEO and Google News Update - February 2021
SEO and Google News Update - January 2021
SEO and Google News Update - December 2020
SEO and Google News Update - November 2020
SEO and Google News Update - September 2020
The Page Experience report provides a summary of the user experience of visitors to your site. Google evaluates page experience metrics for individual URLs on your site and will use them as a ranking signal for a URL in Google Search results on mobile devices. Learn more about page experience on Google.
The Page Experience report is currently limited to mobile URLs.
Page Experience is evaluated per-URL. Currently it is only evaluated using a mobile browser (that is, the evaluation is considered only for users on mobile devices, and only searches from mobile devices are affected). The assessment, and the report, were developed to help sites create pages that provide a better user experience for their visitors.
Page experience in Google Search is evaluated using the following criteria:
Previous news:
SEO and Google News Update - March 2021
SEO and Google News Update - February 2021
SEO and Google News Update - January 2021
SEO and Google News Update - December 2020
SEO and Google News Update - November 2020
SEO and Google News Update - September 2020
The chart shows the following data:
??Important qualifications about the data:
The source data for the Page Experience report is based on the evaluation of data from several other sources and reports: Core Web Vitals report, Mobile Usability report, and so on. These child evaluations occur on different time schedules, so the live, current state of any given URL might be different than that shown on the report. Because of this, you should look at trends in your data (getting better or not?) and the general evaluation (most of your pages are good or not) rather than using this report as an exact, real-time evaluation of a specific URL.
In order to appear in the Page Experience report, a URL must have data in the Core Web Vitals report. (Exception: A URL without Core Web Vitals data might appear in Page Experience if the URL group for that URL appears in Core Web Vitals).
If you see Not enough data collected instead of a chart, it means that you don't have enough data for any URLs on your site in the Core Web Vitals report.
Previous news:
SEO and Google News Update - March 2021
SEO and Google News Update - February 2021
SEO and Google News Update - January 2021
SEO and Google News Update - December 2020
SEO and Google News Update - November 2020
SEO and Google News Update - September 2020
Google's John Mueller was asked "are seals a good way to improve the E-A-T of a website" By seals, the user means trust seals, like BBB seals, security seals, certification seals, anything that conveys a form of trust on the website. John Mueller basically implied no.
John said "I don’t know. I would actually focus on what actually provides, kind of authenticity to users, where users feel trust about a website that they are looking at." He added "taking random seals and copying and pasting them on a website, I don’t think that would really impress users and definitely won’t impress Googlebot."
Of course, he said "obviously if there are specific qualifications that you have, I think it makes sense to highlight that on a page." But does that impress Google? I don't know.
This came up at the 46:20 mark in this past Friday's video:
Question: Are seals a good way to improve the E-A-T of a website?
Answer: I don't know. I would actually focus on what actually provides, kind of authenticity to users, where users feel trust about a website that they are looking at.
Obviously if there are specific qualifications that you have, I think it makes sense to highlight that on a page but just taking random seals and copying and pasting them on a website, I don’t think that would really impress users and definitely won't impress Googlebot.
So that is something where I would focus more on what is actually acceptable by users and what makes sense there.
Google Search is always working to show the most useful and helpful information possible, through testing, experimenting, and review processes. From this, we know people appreciate product reviews that share in-depth research, rather than thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products. That’s why we’re sharing an improvement to our ranking systems, which we call the product reviews update, that’s designed to better reward such content.
This update is going out today and only involves English language reviews for now. We believe this will further help those producing rich content in the product reviews area.
Although this is separate from our regular core updates, the advice that we provide about producing quality content for those is also relevant here. The overall focus is on providing users with content that provides insightful analysis and original research, and is written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well.
For those creating content, here are some additional useful questions to consider in terms of product reviews. Do your reviews:
Previous news:
SEO and Google News Update - March 2021
SEO and Google News Update - February 2021
SEO and Google News Update - January 2021
SEO and Google News Update - December 2020
SEO and Google News Update - November 2020
SEO and Google News Update - September 2020
Google's John Mueller explains 301 and 302 redirects
Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that Google that 302 redirects are more about telling Google that the source URL might be preferred, while a permanent 301 redirect suggest the destination URL:
With redirects, we tend to put URLs into the same bucket, and then use canonicalization to pick which one to show. The rankings will generally be the same, so whether it's source or destination URL doesn't really matter.
A temporary redirect (like a 302) is more about telling us the source URL might be preferred, while a permanent one suggests the destination URL would be. We use a lot more than just redirects for canonicalization though.
In this lightning episode of AskGooglebot, John Mueller answers questions such as: Can a self referential canonical override an existing canonical or preferred page? (submitted by @adityaskrishnan) (0:04?) Will putting the date and month in URLS affect my Google ranking? (submitted by @VaranasiBlogger) (0:22?) I heard that using CDNs to deliver images might be a problem for Google Search since it’s not on my server and Google doesn't support image canonicalization. (submitted by @loujay60606) (0:38?) What is the best way to appear in Search if you have a global audience to target with a single domain? (submitted by @rahulsetia007) (0:57?) Is it such a bad thing to leave the Google Webmasters verification file out of sitemap.xml? (submitted by @RMWPublishing) (1:20?).
I am still not over losing rel prev/rel next and Google's John Mueller was asked about it on a video hangout from yesterday. In short, John said Google is no longer using this and no longer needs to. Google is now "able to recognize common types of pagination setups on our own," he said.
Google's John Mueller confirmed the search engine does continue to ignore rel previous and rel next. John said, "yes, they are ignored" when asked about them.
John added that Google did once use them to understand pagination but now Google is "able to recognize common types of pagination setups on our own," he said. He added that Google "can process those as normal internal links and understand the context from there," adding that Google "no longer needs these special link attributes."
After Google stopped supporting those link attributes, it gave us some advice on how Google can better understand pagination on your site.
In any event, this came up in the video at the 35:05 mark into the video, here is the embed at the start time:
Powered by WHMCompleteSolution