Google Page Experience Update to Launch in Mid-June 2021

Recently Google announced that the Google Page Experience Update is all set to launch next Mid-June 2021. That’s roughly a year after Google first announced the update and also gives us another six months to prepare ourselves for it. In the announcement, Google said, “Today we’re announcing that the page experience signals in ranking will start the rollout in Mid-June 2021 and the rollout will be fully complete at the end of August 2021.” The Google Page Experience Update will take expected user experience into consideration for ranking in search results.

Google also noted that it’ll experiment with showing a “visual indicator that highlights pages in search results that have great page experience.”

1. What is Google Page Experience Update?

Google will evaluate a set of signals to understand how a user will perceive the experience of a particular webpage. These include signals like how quickly a webpage loads, If the webpage is mobile-friendly, runs on HTTPS, has intrusive interstitials, and whether web content falls around as the webpage loads.

So, in short, page experience is made up of various existing Google search ranking factors such as the Page Speed Update, Mobile-Friendly Update, Safe Browsing Penalty, HTTPS Ranking Boost, the Intrusive Interstitials Penalty, etc. Speed and usability are the main Google Page Experience metrics refinements that come under what Google calls Core Web Vitals.

2. Visual Indicators for Google Page Experience

When the Google Page Experience Update comes to live, Google said it’ll test numerous ways to display a “visual indicator” in the search results that highlights webpages that have a great page experience. Google has already shown these types of visual indicators with AMP icons, Mobile-Friendly Labels, Slow Labels, and many more.

While talking about visual indicators Google said “We believe that giving information about the quality of a webpage’s page experience can help users to choose the search result that they actually want to visit,” Google also wrote, “we are working on the visual indicators that identify webpages that have met all of the page experience criteria.” Further talking about visual indicators, Google said: “We plan to test the visual indicators soon and if we get success in the testing, it will launch in Mid-June 2021 and we’ll share more insightful details on the progress of this testing in the coming months.”

3. How to Prepare for the Google Page Experience Update

You can start optimizing your webpages for a better user experience according to the above mentioned Google ranking factors. The Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console is a perfect place to check how your website is performing in the specific Google ranking factors that impact your Page Experience.

AMP will not be required for article contents to display in the Top Stories carousel in search results after the launch of Google Page Experience in Mid-June 2021. However, Google will continue to support AMP because Google calling it “one of the cost-effective and easiest ways for content publishers who want to accomplish great page experience outcomes.” If you publish an AMP version of your web content, Google Search will “display the link to that cache-optimized AMP version content to provide optimal results delivery to users,” Google said.

Conclusion

As of now, we can’t predict how much this Google Page Experience Update will really have an impact on our search rankings. However many SEOs expect it will be a relatively minor one since many of the Google Page Experience signals are already included in the Google search algorithms factors. At the same time, the visual indicators of page experience in search results can give a competitive advantage for the pages that have better page experience.

I hope this post gives you good information about Google Page Experience Update and how you can prepare your website for the update.

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AboutAbirika Soolabanee

Abirika Soolabanee working as a Senior Manager - Inbound Marketing & Branding at Prime One Global. She is a certified content and Inbound marketer with five years of experience. Bringing expertise in content marketing, inbound marketing, branding, blogging, copywriting, SEO, keyword research, and research & analytics. She is passionate about Inbound Marketing, Branding and Blogging. She writes in-depth articles and guides about digital marketing trends, technologies, and other lifestyle topics since 2018. Through her writings, she loves to help people in all aspects of their life.