Marketing 3 min read

Page Experience to Become a Google Ranking Signal Soon

Fonstra / Shutterstock.com

Fonstra / Shutterstock.com

Several studies indicate that web users prefer sites that offer excellent page experience.

Main Takeaways:

  • Google to make page experience a ranking signal next year.
  • The company made the early announcement to give site owners and admins enough time to improve their websites.

Over the years, Google has added various user experience criteria as ranking factors on its search engine. These include mobile-friendliness and page speed.

Earlier in the month, the Chrome team also introduced Core Web Vitals. It’s a set of metrics — related to speed, responsiveness, and visual stability — to help site owners evaluate the user experience on the web.

Now, Google is adding to this work. Yesterday, the search engine giant announced an early look at an upcoming search ranking factor that incorporates these metrics.

In a blog post announcement, Director of Engineering for Search Ecosystem, Sowmya Subramanian‎ wrote:

“We will introduce a new signal that combines Core Web Vitals with our existing signals for page experience to provide a holistic picture of the quality of a user’s experience on a web page.”

Note that the announcement is a sort of heads up. Google wants to inform people about the new ranking factor as early as it can.

So, the changes will not take effect until at least 2021.

Google’s Page Experience Signal

Google is calling the upcoming ranking signal the Page Experience signal.

Along with the Core Web Vitals, the new signal consist of other existing user experience metrics. These include mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTPPS-security, as well as intrusive Interstitial guidelines.

Since user experience and expectations are continually evolving, the metrics will continue to change over time.

“Because we continue to identify and measure aspects of page experience, we plan to incorporate more page experience signals on a yearly basis,” said Google.

Page Experience and Ranking

As you may have guessed, the upcoming signal’s goal is to help site owners build pages that users enjoy.

So, pages that provide a high-quality user experience based on the new signal will enjoy a higher ranking on Search. With that said, content relevance is still an essential factor when it comes to ranking on Google.

Highly relevant content to a specific query will rank high in search results, even though the page experience signal is weak. But, there’s an exception to the rule.

“A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content,” says Google. “However, in cases where there are multiple pages with similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.”

How can you Evaluate Core Web Vitals?

A variety of Google tools are available for measuring Core Web Vitals. These include the Search Console, PageSpeed Insight, Lighthouse, Chrome DevTools, Chrome UX report, among others.

A Chrome browser plugin for evaluating Core Web Vitals should be available soon. Also, Google is working with third-parties to create other tools that can determine the metrics.

Read More: Mueller Explains Why Google Rewrites Meta Descriptions

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Sumbo Bello

Sumbo Bello is a creative writer who enjoys creating data-driven content for news sites. In his spare time, he plays basketball and listens to Coldplay.

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