Good morning, Search Marketer, go grab some coffee.
Were you up all night worrying about your Core Web Vital scores? Can't sleep because the Google Page Experience Update is just around the corner? Well, we've been through updates like these before. Remember Mobilegeddon, maybe the HTTPS update, or the intrusive interstitials penalty and many like it? They all turned out to not be a huge update that really impacted rankings that much at all. In fact, Danny Sullivan of Google said on Twitter, "It shouldn't be the case that overnight, we flip some type of switch and there's a massive change." He admitted "that's not typically how rollouts of this nature (such as speed, mobile-friendliness) have worked."
Relevance will rank supreme: "While all of the components of page experience are important, we will rank 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," Google wrote.
So really, do not lose sleep over this, everything will be fine. Yes, tackle the Core Web Vital issues that are most serious. Ultimately having a good user experience on your site will help with conversions, site revenues and happier website visitors. But I wouldn't bank on it giving you a noticeable ranking boost or even a noticeable ranking decline.
Barry Schwartz,
Your SEO Sleep Therapist
