Noindexed Pages Affect Core Web Vitals, Says Mueller

Google stated that professional SEO experts and webmasters can still use noindexed pages to evaluate their websites' Core Web Vitals, which will soon become one of the search ranking factors. This means that pages that were not a part of Google's search index might be used to assess a set of metrics that will affect website rankings on the search engine results pages, making it a major concern for SEO experts and webmasters.

The topic was covered in one of the Google Search Central live streams, with John Mueller discussing the topic with the SEO community on 4 December.

One of the questions was related to aggregate data, which Google uses to measure the Core Web Vitals. What the search engine company does is take a group of pages, analyse them, and use the information to measure a website's Core Web Vitals. The search engine will use the same evaluation method once the new Web Vitals ranking factor launches next year.

The question specifically asked Google how their algorithm systems will know that what they are looking at is a group if they have no context and they are noindexed pages. They also asked if they will just depend on the URL path, which could cause issues for websites that have slow, noindexed pages. Slow pages might negatively affect a website's Core Web Vitals even though they do not appear on the search results.

Mueller explained why noindexed pages still affect the Core Web Vitals. The rationale was that users can still access noindexed pages, seeing it as a part of the website. For this reason, the Core Web Vitals will still include them on the overall page evaluation as they assess the site's page experience.

However, Mueller is not sure of how the Search Console selects the pages for evaluation. The only thing he knows is that Google holds information regarding how the grouping is made, which is found in the Chrome User Experience report, but he does not know the details.

Mueller also said that it is hard for Google to take context out of a noindexed page due to canonical decisions and other factors. Assessing an individual page on its own is somewhat tricky because it is not clear if it can be evaluated directly, or if there are cookies that were set from the very start should be set to access the page. There are just too many factors involved.

Another concern that SEO experts and webmasters have is whether or not they are able to exclude pages from being assessed by the Core Web Vitals, but Mueller said that there are no answers for this question at the moment. He admits that he does not know all the information there is about grouping, so he does not want to assume his answers.

He then explained how grouping works across websites in general. Mueller said that Google sorts pages into groups depending on the page content and the URL. For this reason, SEOs must use folders to signal and tell Google which pages they should recognise as a group.

Understanding these new Google algorithms beforehand will help SEOs and other webmasters to use the most efficient techniques in boosting their brand visibility online. If you are running your own business, it can be difficult for you to deal with the SEO process since this is an entirely different industry that requires time and effort before you see the results.

Therefore, you stand to benefit from working with professional SEO experts so you can focus on dealing with your own business operations. Here at Position1SEO, we have highly experienced and fully trained SEO consultants who can provide you with up-to-date methods and the expertise on how to boost your website rankings organically and turn your visitors into paying customers.

If you want to work with our SEO experts, send us an email at office@position1seo.co.uk. You may also dial 0141 404 7515.