Join Fusion’s SEO team as we round up last month’s major industry updates.
New Page Experience Report in Google Search Console
Google has launched a new Page Experience report within Google Search Console to help site owners better prepare for the rollout of the upcoming page experience update. The report includes existing Core Web Vitals along with the other page experience signals, listed as Mobile Usability, Security Issues, HTTPS and Ad Experience.
Speaking about this new feature, Google has said “The Page Experience report offers valuable metrics, such as the percentage of URLs with good page experience and search impressions over time, enabling you to quickly evaluate performance”.
Here’s what the new report looks like:
More information on the report’s full capabilities can be found in the Page Experience Report Google help document.
Along with this, Google has also introduced the ability to filter pages by ‘Good Page Experience’ within the GSC Performance report, allowing site owners to easily keep track of how pages with “Good Page Experience” compare to others on the site.
Google Postpone Page Experience Rollout and Provide More Insight
In a blog post providing “More time, tools, and details”, Google has stated that the Page Experience update will be a gradual rollout, beginning in mid-June 2021 and not playing a full role as part of their ranking systems until the end of August. Meaning the update will now finish much later than the original rollout schedule of May 2021.
Google gave the following reasoning for the update being rolled out gradually rather than in real time, “because we’re doing this as a gradual rollout, we will be able to monitor for any unexpected or unintended issues”.
Google Updated How Cumulative Layout Shift is Scored
Changes have been made to how Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is calculated, CLS is a measurement of a web page’s visual stability and is one of the Core Web Vital metrics. Google has updated how this is scored to make it more accurate and fair, stating they are “making the CLS metric more fair to pages that are open for a long time”.
Google now reviews CLS on each page in session windows, here’s a visual representation of this new approach:
Layout shifts can occur sporadically over the time a user views a page, for this reason, Google has decided to group them into session windows. The CLS metric now follows this rule: “maximum session window with 1 second gap, capped at 5 seconds”.
Site owners should not however worry about this change. Because the new update caps the CLS calculation window at 5 seconds, Google say “no page will have a worse score as a result of this”.
More Improvements To Google Search Console
Google has improved data filtering and comparison within the Google Search Console Performance report by introducing a regular expression (regex) filter and ‘revamping’ the comparison mode.
Google explained that the new regular expression filter will help “create more complex query and page based filters”. This new feature will allow Search Console users to catch abbreviated queries within a filtered search, for example when looking at performance for a particular query like ‘gin and tonic’, the new regex filter can be used to capture all similarly relates searches such as ‘gin & tonic’ or ‘g&t’.
The newly revamped comparison mode now permits users to select and compare multiple metrics by displaying results side-by-side, the table area is almost doubled in size and does now support the new regex filter.
Google Rollout New Product Reviews Update
Google has released a new product reviews search algorithm update. This is not a core update affecting all search results, it is specifically targeted at rewarding more in-depth, informative product reviews within SERPs.
“We know people appreciate product reviews that share in-depth research, rather than thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products. That’s why we’re sharing an improvement to our ranking systems, which we call the product reviews update, that’s designed to better reward such content”.
Additional useful information on what creators should know about Google’s product reviews update has been provided within the Google Search Central Blog.
If you found this update useful, check out our latest blog posts for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with the team today.
by George Bonelle
