Google's John Mueller said that when it comes to Google measuring speed with the upcoming Google Page Experience and Core Web Vitals metrics, that sometimes individual slow URLs can potentially impact other faster URLs if Google cannot determine the speed of those faster URLs and those URL structures look similar.
In short, he said that Google does try to be as granular as possible with most of the ranking metrics it uses. But when it comes to the data around how fast a URL is, often Google's data is not there. So it has to use the data of the site's aggregate URLs on other URLs of your site. Now, he did say that if you have a subdomain or subfolder that is slow and the rest of the site is fast, then Google is more likely to just treat that section of the site as slow and that won't impact the rest of your site. But it depends. :)
Here is the video embed on how he answered this starting at the 14:33 mark into the video:
Here is the transcript:
Basically is speed looked at on a page by page basis or could slow speed on some pages of your site affect how Google sees your site as a whole?Good question. So in general with our algorithms we try to be as fine-grained as possible. So if we can get granular information for your site and recognize the individual parts of your website properly, then we will try to do that.
However it depends a little bit on your site and how much data we have for your site. Especially when it comes to speed, where it's based or it will be based because it's not not live yet, it'll be based on the Core Web Vitals and the Chrome User Experience report data, which is just a very small sample of the the people that visit your site aggregated. And that's something that doesn't have data for every url of a website. So depending on how much data is available there and how easily it is for us to figure out which parts of your site are separate and then that's something that we can do easier or that is a little bit harder.
We have similar things I guess similar mechanisms across various other signals that we use in search. Oe of them for example is with with adult content, where if you have a part of your website with adult content and a part of your website that has like normal content or other content on it. Then the easier we can recognize that these are separate parts and separate them out individually, the more likely it is that we can just treat that one part slightly differently. And you can do that with things like making sure you have a clean subdirectory structure on your site or using subdomains if that makes sense for your website.
And the easier in in your case it would be for example to split out the forum from our site where we can tell oh slash forum is everything forum and it's kind of slow and everything else that's not in slash forum is really fast uh if we can recognize that fairly easily that's a lot easier. Then we can really say everything here in such forum is kind of slow everything here is kind of okay.
On the other hand if we have to do this on a per url basis where the url structure is really like we can't tell based on the url if this is a part of the forum or part of the rest of your site. Then we can't really group that into parts of your website and then we'll kind of be forced to take an aggregate score across your whole site and apply that appropriately.
I suspect we'll have a little bit more information on this as we get closer to announcing or kind of closer to the date when we start using Core Web Vitals in in Search but it is something you can look at already a little bit in Search Console. There's a Core Web Vitals report there and if you drill down to individual issues you'll also see this url affects so many similar urls and based on that you can already kind of tell oh is Google able to figure out that my forum is grouped together or is it not able to figure out that these belong together.
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
