That is a wrap – the Google page experience update for desktop is now fully rolled out – as of yesterday, March 3rd. If you are counting, that is a 9-day roll out, which began on February 22nd and ended on March 3rd.
Here is the tweet announcing it is done rolling out:
The page experience rollout is now complete for desktop.
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) March 3, 2022
Did you notice any ranking changed related to this update? That is going to be impossible to say but I will say, I doubt it. There was some sort of update that started February 24th and lasted a few days but I doubt that had anything to do with page experience.
Glenn Gabe shared some charts from data he has access to, showing this update didn’t really have much of any impact on rankings:
Now that the Page Experience Update for desktop is complete, here is some data that supports a very lightweight ranking signal. Let’s start with a site that has terrible desktop CWV scores. No change in trending at all during the rollout. pic.twitter.com/5L0AhX4frc
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 3, 2022
And here is a site with great desktop CWV scores and trending is totally normal and stable. No major surges… This is just some initial data, & I’ll be digging in more, but it’s a good reminder that the Page Experience should NOT cause major volatility for your site. Stay tuned. pic.twitter.com/zkTKYuY1PD
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 3, 2022
As a reminder, the same factors, outside of mobile friendliness, are being used for the desktop version of this page experience update – as we reported about earlier. The original Google page experience update was announced in May 2020 and the mobile version went live between June and May 2021. It did not really have a big or visible impact to the overall rankings in the mobile search results and we do not expect there to be a significant impact to the desktop search results with this rollout.
Here is a chart of the factors included in this update compared side by side with desktop to mobile:
In January 2022, Google released the desktop page experience report in Search Console so you can measure your how well your desktop pages are doing with page experience signals.
As a reminder, again, don’t worry – this update won’t have much of an impact on your rankings. Google said before “as we have said before, while this update is designed to highlight pages that offer great user experiences, page experience remains one of many factors our systems take into account. Given this, sites generally should not expect drastic changes. In addition, because we’re doing this as a gradual rollout, we will be able to monitor for any unexpected or unintended issues.”
Here is John Mueller of Google saying this again just last week:
More from @johnmu So, if you do see a big drop, focus on the overall picture of the site & determine what else could be involved. i.e. Significantly improve the site over time. The Page Experience Signal is more of a subtle ranking factor, not a strong one https://t.co/3QBD3UbEx8 pic.twitter.com/tgPz83Xh8J
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 4, 2022
Forum discussion at Twitter & WebmasterWorld.
