Performance as a Ranking Factor: The State of the Web and Core Web Vitals [Part 3]
In part one of this series, we talked about how Google and the web in general were not really ready for the Page Experience Update — Google’s CrUX data covered too few websites, the vast majority of which were not hitting the required thresholds. That was why, I suggested, the update had been so delayed and watered down. In part two , we talked about the metrics themselves — their flimsiness, their arbitrariness, their openness to manipulation. This, too, I suggested, might be holding Google back. However, the proof is in the pudding. Are Core Web Vitals, taken individually or as a whole, correlated with rankings? If so, is that any more true than it was before the Page Experience Update? In this third and final post of this series, we’ll see what the data tells us about the relationship between Core Web Vitals metrics and organic ranking performance. Viewer discretion advised This is, at most, a correlation study. There are many mechanisms by which something can be correlated wit...