+6011 1144 5462Google Page Experience - Google’s New Algorithm coming Next Year
03 June 2020
Google has announced on their official blog that an update to its search alogrithm is coming sometime in 2021 that will combine Core Web Vitals with existing signals for page experience to provide a holistic picture of the quality of a user’s experience on a web page.
What this means is, the user's overall page experience will be taken into consideration while serving up search results in future.
With the global Covid-19 pandemic wreaking havoc, Google has mentioned that the new algorithm will be rolled out sometime in 2021 and is giving everyone ample time to prepare for it.
The Page Experience update will combine the various signals from Core Web Vitals that Google already looks at such as page speed, mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines, to provide a holistic picture of page experience. Google will continue to identify and measure different aspects of the user's page experience with plans to incorporate more experience signals on a yearly basis as user's expectations and needs evolve over time.
The chart below from Google show what goes into the update:
What this means is, the user's overall page experience will be taken into consideration while serving up search results in future.
Here's an excerpt from Google's blog:
The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction.
Core Web Vitals are a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience. They measure dimensions of web usability such as load time, interactivity, and the stability of content as it loads (so you don’t accidentally tap that button when it shifts under your finger - how annoying!).
With the global Covid-19 pandemic wreaking havoc, Google has mentioned that the new algorithm will be rolled out sometime in 2021 and is giving everyone ample time to prepare for it.
The Page Experience update will combine the various signals from Core Web Vitals that Google already looks at such as page speed, mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines, to provide a holistic picture of page experience. Google will continue to identify and measure different aspects of the user's page experience with plans to incorporate more experience signals on a yearly basis as user's expectations and needs evolve over time.
The chart below from Google show what goes into the update:
More from Google's blog:
Page experience ranking
Great page experiences enable people to get more done and engage more deeply; in contrast, a bad page experience could stand in the way of a person being able to find the valuable information on a page. By adding page experience to the hundreds of signals that Google considers when ranking search results, we aim to help people more easily access the information and web pages they’re looking for, and support site owners in providing an experience users enjoy.
For some developers, understanding how their sites measure on the Core Web Vitals—and addressing noted issues—will require some work. To help out, we’ve updated popular developer tools such as Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights to surface Core Web Vitals information and recommendations, and Google Search Console provides a dedicated report to help site owners quickly identify opportunities for improvement. We’re also working with external tool developers to bring Core Web Vitals into their offerings.
While all of the components of page experience are important, we will prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.
Page experience and the mobile Top Stories feature
The mobile Top Stories feature is a premier fresh content experience in Search that currently emphasizes AMP results, which have been optimized to exhibit a good page experience. Over the past several years, Top Stories has inspired new thinking about the ways we could promote better page experiences across the web.
The mobile Top Stories feature is a premier fresh content experience in Search that currently emphasizes AMP results, which have been optimized to exhibit a good page experience. Over the past several years, Top Stories has inspired new thinking about the ways we could promote better page experiences across the web.
When we roll out the page experience ranking update, we will also update the eligibility criteria for the Top Stories experience. AMP will no longer be necessary for stories to be featured in Top Stories on mobile; it will be open to any page. Alongside this change, page experience will become a ranking factor in Top Stories, in addition to the many factors assessed. As before, pages must meet the Google News content policies to be eligible. Site owners who currently publish pages as AMP, or with an AMP version, will see no change in behavior – the AMP version will be what’s linked from Top Stories.
Summary
We believe user engagement will improve as experiences on the web get better -- and that by incorporating these new signals into Search, we'll help make the web better for everyone. We hope that sharing our roadmap for the page experience updates and launching supporting tools ahead of time will help the diverse ecosystem of web creators, developers, and businesses to improve and deliver more delightful user experiences.
In short, a new algorithm is coming from Google in 2021 that will use user experience as one of the ranking criteria but websites still need to concentrate on content as great content will still rank well in spite of poor page experience. So what we should do is to concentrate on creating great content and at the same time, look at how we can improve the user experience on mobile to ensure that when Google's new update happens, our website ranking improves and not drop drastically.
