Google has once again said that if you see significant changes in your Google search visibility it likely has nothing to do with how fast or slow your site is. John said in a hangout last Friday, "I would not assume that making a website from really slow to really fast would cause a significant rise in visibility."
John answered this at the 9:17 mark into the video when he said "The Page Experience Update is generally quite a subtle update. It's not something that would kind of or shouldn't kind of make and very make or break a website."
John added, "if you saw a significant drop in traffic from search I would not assume that it's purely due to kind of you having a slower website."
The person went on and on about it being speed but John double-downed on it and John said "So that's kind of the one thing there I just want to kind of mention that ahead of time because it's easy to sink a lot of time and money into making a faster website and sometimes there are bigger problems on a website than just speed." In short, throwing a ton of money into speed changes explicitly for ranking improvements might not be worth the money.
The SEO then added that even Google's rendering tools sometimes time out when accessing pages. But John said even then, it shouldn't impact rankings that much. John said "If it's even too slow to be tested [rendered in Google’s testing tool] that seems like something to fix just from a user point of view but again I think from a search point of view for most of these things I would not assume that making a website from really slow to really fast would cause a significant rise in visibility. Like there will be some changes but it's usually much subtle."
It goes on and on and John keeps coming back to saying that speed won't make a huge impact on your rankings.
Here is the embed, you can listen to it yourself:
This should come as no surprise, we covered this before. Google has implied that the page experience update is a tie breaker in the past but then said it might be little more than that. Gary Illyes from Google said the page experience update won't be drastic and might be more like a tie breaker signal than something really big. John Mueller of Google said this won't be a drastic update like other Google updates, he added it will be a slow rollout and not felt too much. Danny Sullivan of Google said it won't result in a massive change when rolled out.
What this person probably saw were those core updates in June and July.
Here is how Glenn Gabe summed up this part:
More: If you dropped in June/July (by 50%+), remember that Google launched two broad core updates then. You wouldn't see a 50% drop from the Page Experience Update. 50% is too extreme for that update. There are probably stronger issues & problems there: https://t.co/KLmCiinuZY pic.twitter.com/PklfPNWkQ0
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 26, 2021
Forum discussion at Twitter.
