CWV is a ranking factor that ironically does not improve search results

The senior webmaster Trends Analyst and Search relations team lead at Google, John Mueller quoted in the Google’s search off the record podcast- “Achieving a perfect score will not make a difference in the search results. He further added- “CWV as a ranking factor is one part of a bigger ranking engine and how it is applied is not something that Google talks about”.

The podcast explains how to reconcile and how CWV (Core Web Vitals) can be a ranking factor while at the same not something that will noticeable help rankings.

Actual user experience of the website is more important than CWV

Rick Viscomi and Lizzi Sassman downplayed getting poor Core Web Vitals scores, stating what really matters are how actual users are experiencing the website in terms of site performance in the real world.

The duo quoted – “They tested the core web vitals scores for Google page experience documentation and got different scores. She also shared that Google’s own documentation on Page experience only scored 45 on a scale of 1-100. Actual website performance of users browsing the website matters more than the scores”

CWV are great for benchmarking performance in terms of optimizing for sales, ad clicks and conversions which is where a good user experience literally pays off.

CWV improvements now visible in search

CWV as per John Mueller is used in the ranking systems. But the incremental improvements in the CWV scores will not be noticeable in search results. He further added that achieving perfect CWV scores will not make difference in search results.

He added-“I think the big issue is also that the site owners sometimes over-fixate on the metrics themselves. And they spend months of time kind of working on this. And they see this as they are doing something for their search rankings. And probably a lot of those increment changes are not really visible search.”

“The details we tend not to go into. We do not go into thresholds or anything like that. Similarly to how we do not talk about how many words on a page you have to have or all of those details which from my point of view are almost secondary”.

The takeaway is that it is good to improve CWV but a perfect CWV will be rewarded with better rankings.

Conceptualizing core web vitals

Here both talk about the importance of speed in the wider and more general sense and then zoom in to more narrow sense of ranking where they talk about factors that actually make a difference. They stated that performance is good in general sense and other factors are good in more narrow sense of rankings.

Rick Viscomi explains how web performance is important- “It is really good for everybody and the rising tide lifts all boats. Check your website. Make it faster. Eat your vegetables.”

Lizzi Harvey advises that better use of time is to focus on the content quality, which is the narrow focus on improving rankings.

She added-“Focusing on content quality and then still having like a terrible article like the words on the page are not good or the design is not good and you made it really fast. It that really going to make an improvement for your users or for search?”

Ways of looking at Core Web Vitals

The podcast naturally turned out and it makes sense to conceptualize Core Web Vitals as a general big picture factor because it helps reconcile how something can be a ranking factor that on its own does not really make a difference in search results.