SEO News You Can Use: Google’s New, Updated Page Experience Ranking Factors

Google announced on Thursday that it’ll be rolling out updated “page experience” ranking factors in 2021 and the Core Web Vitals (introduced by the Chrome team May 5) will be included. Web Vitals is a new program by Google, focused on ensuring every website creates a great user experience (UX). Google is looking closely at how your visitors interact with your website and taking note of whether the site is mobile-friendly, visually stable and running a secure URL (HTTPS).

Web Vitals will be combined with existing metrics for page experience to provide a holistic idea of the website visitors’ experience when interacting with the page. Also, important to note, these metrics will be added to the ranking criteria for the mobile “Top Stories” feature and the AMP requirement will be removed from Top Stories’s eligibility.

Google said the idea behind this early announcement and tools update — developer tools have been updated so you can optimize your site’s page experience yourself — is in an effort to prepare everyone ahead of time. And, it’s to abate those disgruntled by Google’s eleventh-hour announcements that have many scrambling to try and fix their site to meet the new changes and parameters.

Also, Google recognizes that creating a sudden change to ranking factors right now is unfair considering most businesses are trying to claw back what they can since the start of the coronavirus. Thankfully, the ranking changes won’t go into effect until 2021 and Google said it would provide at least a six month notice before implementing the changes as part of its algorithm. However, there’s no need for site owners to take any immediate actions now, but the tools are available in Google Search Console.

To find out more about how Google defines page experience, what page experience ranking is and the changes to the mobile Top Stories feature, check out Google’s official blog on the subject.

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Editor’s Note: “SEO News You Can Use” is a weekly blog post posted every Monday morning only on SEOblog.com, rounding up all the top SEO news from around the world. Our goal is to make SEOblog.com a one-stop-shop for everyone looking for SEO news, education and for hiring an SEO expert with our comprehensive SEO agency directory.