We know that the Core Web Vitals will be a ranking factor in May 2021. This means that all your website pages have to load fast and you should have a good Core Web Vitals Score.
Google has been telling webmasters and SEOs that it always ranks pages and not websites. This means that every page is treated on its own and it does not really matter how good or bad the other pages perform. However, everyone does not believe in this theory of Google ranking pages and not websites.
If we assume this to be true, then we should also assume that Google will treat every page individually when it comes to Core Web Vitals. In other words, if 5 pages on my website have good Core Web Vitals scores and 3 have low scores, then the ones with low scores will have no negative effect on the ones with high scores.
A good example would be affiliate websites where most of the traffic is to the inner pages. So as an affiliate, I might care less about my homepage Core Web Vitals score as I don’t expect it to rank or make any conversions.
The problem here is that this might not be true. If we go by what John Mueller said in a recent Google SEO hours discussion, few pages with low Core Web Vitals scores may impact the whole domain.
Impact of Low Score Core Web Vitals Pages on Other Pages
In the latest Google SEO hours, Praveen Sharma asked this question.
If there are 20 pages on a website that have a good Core Web Vitals score and then there are 20 other pages on the same website which have average or low scores, will the pages with bad scores have an impact on pages with good scores?
Google’s John Mueller started answering this by stating that
Chrome’s user experience report data reports at different levels. He further stated that, depending on the data available to Google, the results can be more fine-grained or there can be just one score that will be used across the whole website.
He continued by saying that some of this data can be seen in the search console directly where a set of pages are grouped together at one data point.
So this does mean that if Google does not have a Core Web Vitals score for one of your most important money pages, then it can just consider a score from other pages on the same domain.
Praveen further asked how it would work on sub-domain levels. John answered this by saying that sub-domains are treated differently so the scores will be different.
Webmasters and SEO experts know that Google does treat sub-domains differently and it is clear that the same will be applicable to Core Web Vitals. But, not many would have thought that a few pages with bad Core Web Vitals scores can impact the whole domain.
So if you were ignoring the Core Web Vitals scores for your ‘not so important’ pages, you might have to change that and look into every single page.
Here’s the video: