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If you’re a site owner or you’ve been following Google’s moves this summer, you’re probably exhausted. The search engine company typically unleashes major updates to its search algorithms a few times a year – but this summer alone, there were a heavy handful of updates.
These included two major updates called ‘core updates,’ as well as a Page Experience update, and a few that targeted spam.
OUR COVERAGE OF GOOGLE’S UPDATES:
SEOs may be curious about how each element of their sites were affected by these updates – and which elements correlate to which updates. There’s value in knowing this, as SEOs can do damage control if necessary, and prepare for what to expect when the next update comes.
Search Engine Journal reports that there was chatter on the web about page speed following these updates.
On a recent livestream, a viewer asked Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller about the role that the speed of a page could play in its ability to rank. Specifically, they wanted to know if the two core updates took page speed into consideration.
In response, Mueller explained that the core updates themselves did not necessarily focus on page speed:
“We call them both core updates because they affect the core of our ranking systems, but that doesn’t mean that they affect the same core parts of the ranking system,” he said. “I wouldn’t assume that have to be related.”
Mueller explained that if any update took page speed into consideration, it would have to be the Page Experience update. This update takes three ‘core web vitals’ into consideration – one of which is the speed at which content loads, and another is how quickly a page becomes interactive. First launched in mid-June, this update will continue rolling out until some point in August.
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