Good Core Web Vitals Scores Won’t Improve Indexing

Having good Core Web Vitals scores won’t necessarily lead to improved indexing of your webpages in Google’s search results.

This is stated by Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller during a recent Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout.

A question is asked regarding Core Web Vitals and whether the scores can impact site quality, therefore affecting how many pages of a site get indexed.

Site quality is directly related to indexing, as Google aims to index high quality content that adds value to the web.

If your site doesn’t meet a certain threshold for quality it could result in your pages getting indexed slowly, or not getting indexed at all.

However, Core Web Vitals scores are ranking factors, not quality factors. So raising the scores won’t have a direct impact on indexing.

Here’s Mueller response.

Can Core Web Vitals Scores Impact Google Indexing?

Mueller notes that it’s difficult to answer this question without looking at a specific website.

Generally speaking, since Core Web Vitals and Page Experience are not quality factors, they’re not likely to have much of an impact on indexing.

Mueller states:

“I don’t think so. It’s really kind of hard to look at this without looking at a specific website. But, essentially, the Core Web Vitals kind of plays into the Page Experience ranking factor — and that’s more of a ranking factor. That’s not a quality factor.

And in particular, it doesn’t play in with how much we actually crawl and index from the website. In some cases, there is a little bit of a relationship between how fast the page is and how fast we can crawl it, but it doesn’t have to be that way. So that’s something where usually these sides are less connected and not completely tied together.”

Mueller goes on to say that good Core Web Vitals scores won’t always lead to faster crawling either.

In addition to Core Web Vitals and Page Experience factors, there are so many other elements that go into how fast a page loads

“So in particular when it comes to Page Experience, because the time it takes for a page to actually load depends on so many factors — more than just that one request to the server, it can be that maybe you have fonts on this page or maybe you have large images that are pulled in from other sites. All of these things are elements that play into how fast the page loads for a user, but don’t actually map to how fast we can crawl a page.

Obviously, if your server is so slow that any request made to the server kind of takes a couple of sections, then that’s something where I’d say well, your page will be slow and Google’s crawling will be slow just because we can’t crawl as much as we would like. But, for the most part, if you’re talking about some pages are good, and crawling is reasonably fast, then I wouldn’t expect to see a relationship between the Core Web Vitals scores and the crawling and indexing of a website.”

Hear Mueller’s full response in the video below:

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