On countless occasions, Google’s John Mueller has made clear the importance of viewing your website’s SEO as a unified whole. His comments have poured cold water on suggestions that great parts of a website can compensate for lousy parts, or that you can improve your site’s SEO performance by focusing on a single section.
If you want to please Google’s crawlers, you need to present your entire site as legit.
Interestingly, Mr Mueller has now gone on record to explain that in terms of the recent Page Experience update, Google sometimes splits sites into different sections based on specific metrics. A site may be divided into sections like product pages, category pages or pages with the same template, in order to perform a valuation on their own unique merit.
“Depending on how much data we have for a website, we might split it up into different sections,” is how he put it.
This effectively confirms that in terms of the Page Experience update and Core Web Vitals, not all sections of a website may be scored the same.
Here is the full extract from Mr Mueller’s conversation, complete with his explanation of how this segmentation works:
“The other thing is with the page experience update, depending on how much data we have for a website, we might split it up into different sections. And we try to do that by understanding which pages across a website are essentially similar.”
“And that can be kind of like by type of template or something like that. Which means if we can see that all of, I don’t know, like say for an e-commerce site all of the product pages are really fast and maybe we have enough data to look at the product pages separately, then we can kind of have that group of pages kind of treated on its own.”
“And if there’s a different kind of page across the site that has enough data that is kind of slow, then we’ll say well this kind of page is more slow.”
“So that’s kind of the second part there in that if you have a kind of page that is very slow and we can have we have enough data for that kind of page to understand well this is just that part of the website, then just that part will be affected by the Core Web Vitals and the page experience update.”