Google updated the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console on March 27, 2023. The update may have resulted in a change in the number of URLs in your Core Web Vitals report, the search company wrote.

Google wrote, “You may see a change in the number of URLs in your Core Web Vitals report. This is because more URLs are now being reported on due to a new origin group that contains data for URLs that previously fell below the data threshold.”

You should see a little marker notifying you of this update in the report, here is what it looks like:

Here is more about URL Groups from the Google help document:

URLs in the report are grouped into pages that have a similar user experience. The LCP, FID, and CLS status applies to the entire group. Some outlier URLs might have better or worse values on some visits, but 75% of visits to all URLs in the group experienced the group status shown. It is assumed that these groups have a common framework and the reasons for any poor behavior of the group will likely be caused by the same underlying reasons.

In order to respect user privacy, a URL group must have a minimum amount of data to be shown in the report. If a URL group doesn’t have enough information to display in the report, Search Console creates a higher-level origin group that should contain enough URLs and data to show in the report. This origin group contains data for all URLs in the same protocol://host:port group. For example, if the URL https://m.example.com/a/b/c.html is part of a group that doesn’t have enough data to show, then Search Console will create the origin group https://m.example.com. This origin group contains data for all URLs under https://m.example.com, whether or not the URL also belongs to a group with sufficient data.

Note, I don’t think Core Web Vitals are that vital to SEO, so I wouldn’t get bogged down in these reports for SEO or ranking reasons.

Forumdiskussion kl Twitter.

Gary Illyes from Google sa that in some cases, Google may not fully render a page before showing it in Google Search or Google News. It depends on how timely that content is and how quickly Google needs to index and serve it in Google Search.

That does not mean Google won’t render the page fully, it will, eventually. But if a story is breaking and Google wants to show it in Google Search within minutes of the story being published, Google might have to come back later and fully render it later. Immediately, Google might process the HTML and then come back and render the page later to better understand the page.

Here are those tweets from Gary Illyes on this topic:

it’s a bit more subtle than “news doesn’t render”. when you need to index fast, you need to have tighter deadlines and that might mean, for example, that we end up with the raw HTML in serving for a few minutes. It she’s eventually fixes itself, but still

— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) March 23, 2023

This is a small technicality, but yea, eventually Google will make an effort to render the page and Google is not slow at doing that.

Forumdiskussion kl Twitter.

The folks over at Whitespark has published there 2023 local ranking factors study, where they asked dozens of local SEO experts to rank what they think are the most important ranking signals for local pack and organic local search rankings.

Of course, most SEOs know by now that these ranking studies are controversial, but I love reading them, so maybe you like reading them too?

The top factors according to this study and the experts, specific to local pack rankings, are:

• Primary Google Business Profile category
• The keywords in your business name/title
• Proximity to searcher
• Physical address in the city of search
• Removal of spam listings through spam fighting

There is a whole list of data you can expand and see more.

And for the top factors for organic local rankings in general:

• Dedicated pagr for each service
• Internal linking across website
• Quality/authority of inbound links to domain
• Geographic keyword relevancy of content
• Keywords in Google Business Profile landing page title

You can check out the full study här.

Forumdiskussion kl Local Search Forum.