Safe Browsing No Longer A Google Ranking Signal

Google announced that it has removed the safe browsing signal as part of the page experience update. In fact, Google implied it was never used as a signal, saying the it is "clarifying that Safe Browsing isn't used as a ranking signal."

I suspect that means that it was never used as a ranking signal despite Google originally saying it was a signal for the page experience update.

Google also said it is removing safe browsing from the Page Experience report it has in Search Console. But Google will continue to notify site owners of safe browsing issues in Google Search Console, but not in this report.

Here is the revised chart of the Google page experience signals:

Here is the original old version:

Google also made these changes around missing data to the page experience report in Google Search Console:

• Added a "No recent data" banner to the Core Web Vitals report and Page Experience report.
• Fixed a bug that caused the report to show "Failing HTTPS" when Core Web Vitals data was missing. (FYI, this was an ongoing bug that was frequently asked.)
• Rephrased the empty state text in the Page Experience report and Core Web Vitals report.

Google began rolling out the page experience update back in June 15, 2021 and it is still rolling out and will do so until the end of August 2021. I assume then, it will continue to refresh and update. But again, we have seen little to no impact in rankings from this and still consider this to be a super light weight signal (a tie breaker if you will).

Here is a bit more information about the changes to the page experience report in Google Search Console from Jeffery Jose of Google:

There are 2 types of updates. Lets start with the most obvious one -

Removing safe browsing and ad experience report widgets in PX report. Both continue to live on in Search Console in other places.

— Jeffrey Jose (@jeffjose) August 4, 2021

The second type of change is better handling of missing data.

Sometimes parts of sites dont have enough traffic, and now they are displayed as such in the PX report.

— Jeffrey Jose (@jeffjose) August 4, 2021

Forum discussion at Twitter.