Petter » Marty
I've helped some fairly big sites improve Core Web Vitals (CWV) and only seen minor changes. But as I've said, it's likely to get a bigger impact over time

Petter » Micha
And when mobile-first hit, dubbed «mobilegeddonby many – it did, nothing. Now a few years later it means ranking for mobile searchers or fuggedabboutit.
Micha » Petter
Desktop searchers are still very important. Mobile-first indexing did require people to sort out what they wanted the mobile crawler to see. Google had to decide what kind of content it would index (because it takes a lot of computer resources to maintain Google's index). Obviously, all the desktop searchers can handle mobile-only content – but mobile searchers don't handle desktop-only content so well.
So that's not the same as the Core Web Vitals brouhaha.
Core Web Vitals is Google's latest attempt to get people to speed up their Websites. It's a "ranking signal" in about the same way the "https boost" and the "page speed" scores were ranking signals – and they are both rolled into CWV.
Petter » Micha
The rollout patterns where Google gave notice ahead of time, the postponing, the «zero-changerelease. Not comparing failed mobile-friendliness with CWV, I'm comparing these on the fundamental changing of how the algos evaluate the web. And CWV will get an increased presence, I don't think it'll be as heavy as links or mobile friendliness, but pretty sure it'll be bigger than https in the future.
If you strive towards misunderstanding ppl all you'll get are quarrels.
Mike » Petter
I don't think it will ever be a significant factor. Technology will outpace it. Mobile devices and internet speeds will get faster to the point it will hardly matter what you put on a page.
Petter » Mike
I'm looking at 5G on my phone now, on my macbook pro I'm rigged up with an enterprise line (multiple TB), and arngren.net still fails miserably..
ARNGREN.NET
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Mike » Petter
I didn't say it outpaces it today. I said it will. And as horrible as that site is, it loads in an instant for me on my four year old iphone.
Petter » Mike
This is fast becoming a digression, but while I hope that faster internet is going to emerge soon enough, truth is that its years away. We have the technology to jump to 6G perhaps even 7G, but it requires energy to operate and the only way we can generate enough of that is to burn fossil fuels because solar, wind, waves or hydro cannot match it unless every surface is packet with solar, every mountaintop with multiple windmills, all streams are funneled through hydro (multiple times) and beaches become new power stations.
So just to keep it real, for the next 4-5 years most people will enjoy the internet in the same fashion that they are enjoying it now. Some of us will upgrade to 5G speeds while surfing on the phone, perhaps an assistant finally becomes really useful, but then we'll need to structure everything into JSON objects and mark that up thoroughly (which means it likely wont happen soon even if the tech is there to support it) – and perhaps the next intel chip will allow us to process webpages just a tad bit faster, once people actually get around to updating their hardware.
In the meantime, most people will sit at their 99mbps lines (avg. for people with decent internet in the US according to https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/fastest-slowest-internet), with devices that perhaps have 8 GB RAM and a limited processing capacity that still outshines how much the internet lines can carry of information at any given point, as well as the server ports (dedicated or shared) is able to send at any given second of the day, and this is before we add the Content Management System (cms) compilation of HTML etc. for a lot of websites.
Mike » Petter
And despite all that CWV is still not going to become a significant ranking factor. If it did, it would throw the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) into chaos. Many of the most popular and well-searched sites on the internet fail CWV tests spectacularly.
Core Web Vitals (CWV) was nothing more than an attempt by Google to scare people into tweaking their websites so it cost Google less resources to crawl the internet. The whole update had nothing to do with user experience and everything to do with making Google more money.
Petter » Mike
Rather than discuss what might be (and of course there is also an end in this that benefits Google – every aspect of the algo(rithm)* is in some way, shape or form), I'm just lifting up something that I believe is a fundamental flaw if Google is going to increase CWVs presence on the algorithm that sorts the Search Engine Result Page (SERP), and to this point only one person has acknowledged this in the sub-comments.
I didn't write this post to speculate on how big CWV will be, I just don't see any reasoning into leaving it "as is" because it currently does little to nothing for rankings and it was pushed through the tool that most SEO users are familiar with but everyone else goes "huh, GSwhat?" towards. And Google has also talked about how the mark will move once websites on an overall average gets to a better place and the launch into being a part of the core algo etc. does suggest that it will be since it on face-value follows how they launched mobile-first. And they did launch this as becoming a part of the core algorithm (which sorts websites on the SERP), indicating that at some point it will get an input. Most likely they gave it so little input now that it isn't noticeable, but that is likely to be tested, retested, triple-tested etc. in the years to come.
But based on all the efforts that went into it, the heads up, the tutorials to fix the issues etc. – Google wont get anyone attention unless this at some point becomes a noticeable presence in the sorting of the web. And no I don't want to go into that discussion (I know they messed up before)

Petter » Daniel
I don't see it becoming a major factor like crawlability+indexability, well made content, searcher intent matching or backlinks. But I do think it'll be a noticeable aspect before 2-3 years. I'm currently shipping CWV over to User Experience (UX) because it doesn't really make a difference on rankings yet.
This thread was more about pointing out that while you can report that you have fixed CWV issues, the reports are generated by visitors (and sure enough, in the scenario where CWV becomes a bigger ranking factor – bots designed to make the site look awful). And if it does become a significant factor, the baseline will be what user traffic says it is.
Daniel » Petter
Yeah, I know what you're saying but I just don't see it getting to the point where cwv has such a significant effect on traffic that cwv is unable to gather user data for reports.
Petter » Daniel
In a scenario where it does, seems to me like this becomes a deteriorating spiral if other sites fix it and at some point you'll need to pay for traffic to get data that the problem is gone.
Not trying to sell CWV here, it's just a thought that occured to me. If CWV is to become a bigger ranking factor that this reasoning means they'll need to cap it at some point.
Daniel » Petter
Yeah, I see your logic but nah, it's not gonna happen imo
Kristine » Daniel
Page speed was a major factor because it's applied at the query level and so if you got 10,000 queries and all of them got up valued then you'd do a lot better and if you got them all devalued you would do a lot worse …cwv's operate a bit differently as there is no devaluation issue.

Petter » Friar
Kind of like every other aspect then innit? 😉
Friar » Petter
It's almost like there are no silver bullets for ranking.
Kristine » Friar
It's applied at the query level not the page level so that's where you get your difference.
Friar » Kristine
Yeah I'd like to see any kind of documentation backing that up. We manage dozens of sites and we haven't seen and significant changes whether CWVs are perfect or not.

Fowler » Jenni
Can confirm this. Page speed all over the place for top ten on given term.