Earlier this year, Google announced that Page Experience signals would soon be included in Google Search rankings.
This week, Google announced the rollout date for these new ranking signals. We can expect them to take effect starting in May 2021.
As their name implies, Google Page Experience signals measure how readers interact with a web page, in order to gauge (and reward) the relative quality of user experiences across the web.
We’ve known these changes were coming for some time, and still have another six months to go. Below, we’ll talk about what publishers can expect and what you can do to prepare.
Page Experience involves numerous existing, relatively obvious ranking signals like mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, safe browsing and a lack of intrusive interstitials on a given website.
Important Note: Mediavine recently announced the return of mobile interstitials. Rest assured, these new ad units will pass Google’s strict guidelines (and could earn you additional revenue)!
Page Experience will combine the above factors with Core Web Vitals.
These much-discussed vital signs are basically the old PageSpeed Insights such as the First Input Delay, a retooled Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and the new Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
Google Search Console already uses these metrics, which are also now incorporated into Lighthouse 6 and PageSpeed Insights.
TL;DR/too many acronyms and fake-sounding words — Core Web Vitals are the new pagespeed metrics Google wants us all to hit.
We encourage publishers to check out this article Mediavine’s Director of Product Jordan Cauley wrote about Core Web Vitals to learn what all of these mean — and how to optimize for them — in detail.
Our CEO Eric Hochberger also recently published this helpful guide to solving for Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) specifically.
Google’s blog post regarding the release of Page Experience contains an interesting and telling section on how the success of publishers at these metrics will be communicated on screen:
[Providing information] about the quality of a web page’s experience can be helpful to users in choosing the search result that they want to visit.
On results, the snippet or image preview helps provide topical context for users to know what information a page can provide.
Visual indicators on the results are another way to do the same, and we are working on one that identifies pages that have met all of the page experience criteria. We plan to test this soon and [if successful], it will launch in May 2021 and we’ll share more details [in the coming months].
Google’s goal has always been to provide users with quality content they are searching for, and this indicates how important Page Experience is becoming. If your user experience is deemed top-notch, Google will let readers know with more visual cues.
Only Google can truly answer that, but we’re confident in saying: a lot.
If you’re a Mediavine publisher, or tuned in to the web publishing world at all, you know that site speed has been an important ranking factor for years and is only becoming more critical.
Google using Page Experience as a ranking factor that is more heavily weighted than ever is as safe a bet as you’ll find.
In a previous blog post, Google even said that Page Experience is more important for Search when ranking pages with similar content.
For a company whose explanations of products can be opaque, to put it nicely, this is pretty straightforward. Look for Page Experience to be as influential as we’ve predicted and then some.
Until now, the only way to be eligible for Google’s Top Stories carousel was to be a Google News publisher and run AMP pages.
You’ll still need to be a Google News publisher to qualify come May 2021, but Page Experience guidelines will take the place of AMP pages, which marks a significant change in the overall calculus.
While Google says AMP remains an easy and cost-effective path to great page experiences, our recommendation is to make Page Experience a priority across your entire site, not just AMP.
AMP is, in essence, a second version of your pages. Our philosophy is to solve for Page Experience site-wide, maintaining full control of your site and only maintaining one version of it.
It not only makes for a better experience for publishers and users alike, but because you (and Mediavine) will have greater control over monetization, revenues should increase as well.
The long and short of it: Solve for Page Experience and you won’t need AMP.
If you’re a reader of the Mediavine blog, chances are good that your site is already mobile-friendly, secure and free of invasive, obnoxious advertising.
And perhaps you’ve heard us champion the virtues of pagespeed once, maybe even two or three times.
We will make certain that our Script Wrapper is optimized for these new Web Vitals goals, along with our plugins Create and Grow.
Oh, and it should go without saying that Trellis will help you hit the Web Vital scores you need.
We’ll be monitoring any further developments and passing along any new details, but remember, changes impacting site speed and improving the web are something we’re prepared for and advocate for.
Page Experience is no different, and we’ve got this together.
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