Google says that having good Core Web Vitals scores does not guarantee that your pages will be indexed in search results.
Having good Core Web Vitals scores will not necessarily lead to better indexing of your web pages in Google’s search results.
John Mueller, Google search representative, during a recent Google Search Central SEO Office Hours Hangout.
A question was asked about Core Web Vitals and whether scores can affect site quality, thus influencing the number of pages on a site that are 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 does not meet a certain quality threshold, your pages may be indexed slowly or not at all.
However, Core Web Vitals scores are ranking factors, not quality factors. So increasing the scores will not have a direct impact on indexing.
Here is Mueller’s answer.
Can Core Web Vitals scores impact Google indexing?
Mueller notes that it is difficult to answer this question without looking at a specific website.
In general, since Core Web Vitals and Page Experience are not quality factors, they are not likely to have much impact on indexing.
Mueller states:
I don’t think so. It’s really hard to look at this without looking at a specific website. But basically, the type of Core Web Vitals plays into the Page Experience ranking factor, and that’s more of a ranking factor. It’s not a quality factor.
And in particular, it doesn’t play into how much we actually crawl and index the website. In some cases, there is a small relationship between the speed of the page and how fast we can crawl it, but it doesn’t have to be that way. So it’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.
In addition to the Core Web Vitals and Page Experience factors, there are many other elements that determine how fast a page loads.
So particularly when it comes to Page Experience, because the time it takes to actually load a page depends on so many factors: more than just a request to the server, it could be that maybe you have fonts on this page or maybe you have large images that are pulled from other sites. All of these things affect the speed at which a page loads for a user, but they don’t actually correspond to the speed at which we can scan a page.
Obviously, if your server is so slow that any request made to the server takes a couple of minutes, then that’s something I’d say well, your page will be slow and the Google crawl will be slow just because we can’t crawl as much as we’d like. But, for the most part, if you’re talking that some pages are good and crawling is reasonably fast, I wouldn’t expect to see a relationship between Core Web Vitals scores and crawling and indexing a website.
Listen to Mueller’s full response in the video below:
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