Google Announces Delays In Major Update to Search Algorithm

John Morgan, Director of Analytics at MHP/Team SI discusses the latest Google Algorithm and how it may impact your SEO performance.

You may be aware that Google announced in November 2020 that they were making a “page experience update” to their algorithm to take place in May of this year. According to Google’s Development blogs, “the page experience update will consider several page experience signals, including the three Core Web Vitals metrics.”

The three Core Web Vitals are:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.

First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of less than 100 milliseconds.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

Yesterday, Google announced on their developer blog that they are moving back the rollout to be a “gradual rollout starting in mid-June this year” and the “page experience updates won’t play its full role as part of those systems until the end of August.” The purpose for the change in the timeline is “sites generally should not expect drastic changes” and they “will be able to monitor for any unexpected or unintended issues.”

At MHP/Team SI, we’ve been monitoring this very closely and working with our teams to plan and implement the Core Web Vitals as not to disrupt rankings and improve performance.

We will continue to share information as it comes in.

Please feel free to reach out with questions.

Learn more about Google Core Web Vitals: What to Expect with Google’s Latest Core Algorithm Update