Google Page Experience Update Rewards Good User Experience With 5 Key Signals.

This update did not come as a surprise to webmasters because Google announced it was coming, back in May 2020, yes, more than a year ago.
Simply put, 5 signals will now measure how user’s perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its information value, both on mobile and desktop devices. It includes Core Web Vitals, which is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page. It also includes 3 existing search signals (‘mobile friendliness’, ‘HTTPS’, and ‘intrusive interstitial’).

The Google Page Experience Update will focus on rewarding web pages that comply with these 5 ranking signals, that is now one of the ranking factors measured before indexing a URL in Google search engine result pages (SERP).

This update also signals that a good UX design and layout has an ever increasing focus for Google and it’s importance therefore to SEO can not be overstated. Anything that impacts positively on improving the quality and readability of content will be rewarded by search engines, especially by Google.

The 5 Signals Of Page Experience Ranking Factor.

SEO experts do or should know, but for those not familiar with all of the ranking factors Google has to calculate a URL’s value, there are about 200 Google Ranking Factors. The Google Algorithm is one of the closest guarded secrets and what weight is applied to each signal is unknown. For this reason any SEO plan must treat all signals and factors as important.
The same can be said for the following 5 signals that make up the ranking factor for ‘Page Experience’, so the order should not be interpreted as a level of importance.

1. Core Web Vitals

   These are a new set of 3 performance metrics that focus on how performance connects to user experience. The metrics are:

   1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, strive to have LCP occur within the first 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load
   2. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, strive to have a CLS score of less than 0.1, and
   3. First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, strive to have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds

2. Mobile Friendliness

   Whether your site has issues with a ‘mobile friendly design’, as flagged by the Google Mobile Friendly Test tool or Google Search Console.

3. Safe Browsing

   Whether your site has any malware issues, harmful downloads, deceptive content (e.g., phishing), or other similar issues as flagged by Google Search Console.

4. HTTPS usage

   Whether your site has an SSL certificate and uses HTTPS.

5. No intrusive interstitials on mobile

   Whether your site displays intrusive popups/interstitials to mobile users who are clicking through from Google search (the mobile popup penalty, which has been around since 2017).

As you can imagine, SEO specialists, those professionals that optimise websites for search engines to make a page appear high in search engine result pages (SERP) were keen on understanding how the Page Experience Update compared to the significance of content. In other words, what was more important.
Google responded:

While all of the components of page experience are important, we will prioritise pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in ‘Search’.

Page ‘Content Is King’, always has been, always will be!

Read more about ‘Understanding page experience in Google Search results‘ at Google Search Central.

The Google Page Experience Update really shouldn’t have had much effect on pages ranking in SERP, because most of these signals have been dealt with in previous major updates and therefore should have been addressed already.

Back on January 19, 2012 ‘Ads Above The Fold Update’ discussed intrusive interstitials.
The ‘HTTPS/SSL Update’ rolled out on August 6, 2014 saw HTTPS sites rewarded, on May 12, 2016 the ‘Google Mobile Friendly 2 Update’ placed an emphasis on user experience for mobile phones and the ‘Google Mobile Page Speed Update’ released on July 9, 2018, placed significance on page loading speeds.
Pages with malicious behaviour including malware, trojans, spyware, ads or viruses had also been dealt with by ‘Webmaster Guidelines’ for years.