Something you may not have heard of, or even understand, is now possibly, going to impact your website pages rankings in Google results, in May!  We’re doomed I tell you.

What Are Core Web Vitals?

Google introduced its “Core Web Vitals Report” earlier last year, and later confirmed that they will become ranking signals for search results in May 2021.

“What are Core Web Vitals?” is a question many online businesses may be asking, or “Isn’t it too late to do anything now?”.

The answers are:

• They are part of Googles’ User Experience metrics that use real-world user data (from Chrome and other sources) to measure if a site provides a good user experience in terms of
  • Page Load Time – How long does it take to load the largest element?
  • Page Visual Stability – Is the page stable as it loads or does it shift/jump around?
  • Page Interactivity – How long does it take before a user can interact with a page (scroll, click, fill forms etc.)

While Google gives reports on both mobile and desktop, your focus should be on mobile-first.

Does Core Web Vitals Impact Your Website?

The first thing you need to do is check if your site is impacted by these metrics by having a look in the Google Search Console account for your website (You don’t know what Google Search Console is? Ok maybe you need to get reading before you address Core Web Vitals).

The Core Web Vitals report was introduced into Search Console in May 2020 and there is no getting away from the fact that to resolve many of the issues brought up by this report, you will need technical knowledge or access to a developer, since most Content Management Systems will enable you to address some, but most of these issues require developer support.

The only other option is to go down the route of paying for one of the many new plug-ins that are appearing for systems like WordPress and Magento, however, using these without some background knowledge or researching that the Plugin does the job it says it does, could cause problems.

So first off log into your website Google Search Console Account and have a look at the Core Web Vitals Report.

Follow the Google recommendations for non-technical and technical users below, but be aware that for non-technical users Google still adds a step about passing on the report to “the development team”, so some level of technical knowledge is still needed.

Steps To Address and Fix Core Web Vitals Issues

Non-technical users steps to address Core Web Vitals Issues Report:

1. Focus on everything labelled as “Poor” first, then look at the issues that impact the largest set of URLs first or by your most important URLs. Those pages assessed as poor by the report are the ones Google will impact after May.

2. Once sorted by priority, pass the report over to your web(developer) team.

3. Common page fixes:

      a. Reduce page size – best practice is under 500Kb for a page and all its resources (images, JavaScript, CSS etc), but as we know ‘best practice’ and the real world are two different things so just look to reduce image size without impacting visual quality, getting rid of large JS or CSS files that are not used on a page and order the way a page is loaded by focusing on ‘above the fold’ elements – the part of the page that shows in a browser without the need to scroll down.

      b. Limit the amount of resources to no more than 50 for best mobile performance.

4. Test your fixes using PageSpeed Insights Testing Tool (or the Chrome Lighthouse tool, if you want to use an in-browser tool).

5. When you consider a page issue fixed then you should click “Start Tracking” on the issue details page in the Google Search Console Core Web Vitals report.

6. Track your validation process, you will likely have to go through the process a few times before getting a passed state.

Website Developers' steps to address Core Web Vitals Issues Report

1. Prioritise issues/pages labelled as “poor” first and focus on “Mobile” since fixing for mobile will likely resolve most of the issues on desktop and Google has been mobile-first focused for years now. If you manage to clear the “poor” URLs by all means start working on those URLs labelled “Needs Improvement”, but it is the “Poor” pages that will be impacted most when these metrics go live in May.

2. Page load speed will resolve many of the flagged issues, so have a look at dev fast loading guidelines for theory and guidelines t improve page load speed. (The web.dev site is a go-to resource for improving performance resources and tips as well as all things Web development.

3. Test your fixes using the PageSpeed Insights testing tool (or the Chrome Lighthouse tool, if you want to use an in-browser tool).

4. When you consider a page issue fixed then you should click “Start Tracking” on the issue details page in the Google Search Console Core Web Vitals report.

5. Track your validation process, you will likely have to go through the process a few times before getting a passed state, the validation states are:

      a. Not Started: There are URLs with an instance of these issues that have never had a validation request.

      b. Started: You have begun a validation attempt, and no remaining instances of the issue have been found as yet.

      c. Looking good: You have started a validation attempt, and all issues checked so far have been fixed.

      d. Passed: All URLs are in a passed state. You must have clicks “Validate Fix” to get to this state, if issues disappear without your having requested validation, the state would have changed to N/A.

      e. N/A: Google found the issue was fixed on all URLs, even though no Validation attempt was started.

      f. Failed: One or more URLs are in a failed state after a validation attempt.

The reality for many eCommerce sites who use systems, such as Shopify, is that you are restricted in how many changes you can make, but even here developers can optimise images, add Lazy loading, Preloading, setting width and height attributes for containers, checking 3rd party code and so on.

So keep calm, access your Search Console Account to see what issues exist, and work through the poor rated pages one step at a time, the more you manage to fix, the smaller the potential impact is going to be in May, and remember, the more you do and the less your competitors do on this issue, the better placed your website will be.

Later this month we will look at some developer actions your team could try that have already worked for large eCommerce sites who have put the time and effort in to address this issue.

If you are interested in hearing more about SEO, do not hesitate to get in contact.

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Meta robots tags are something that you’re almost inevitably going to come across if you work in SEO, but what are they, how do they work and how do they differ from the good old robots.txt? Let’s find out.

What Is A Meta Robots Tag?

A meta robots tag is a snippet of code that’s placed in the header of your web page that tells search engines and other crawlers what they should do with the page. Should they crawl it and add it to their index? Should they follow links on the page? Should they display your snippet in search results in a certain way? You can control all of these with meta robots tags and, while there may be a bit more development resource required in certain content management systems, they’re generally more effective than robots.txt in a lot of regards. I’ll talk more about that later.

Typically speaking, a robots tag would look like this in your HTML source.

As you can see, it’s comprised of two elements: the naming of the meta tag (robots, in this case – meta tags have to declare their identity to work) and the directives invoked (the “content" – in this case, “noindex, follow").

This is probably the most common meta robots tag that you’ll come across and use; the meta robots noindex tag tells search engines that, while they can crawl the page, the noindex directive tells them that they should not add the page to their index. The other directive in the tag, the “follow" tells search engines that they should follow the links on the page. This is useful to know because even if the page isn’t in the search engine index, it won’t be a black hole with the flow of your site’s authority – any authority which the page has to pass to others, either on your site or off, will still be passed by using the “follow" directive.

If you wanted to completely void that page and not have any links on there followed, the tag would look like one of the following:

By adding the “nofollow" attribute, you are telling search engines to not index the page, but also not to follow any links on that page, internal or external. The “none" directive is effectively the same as combining noindex and nofollow, but it’s not as commonly used. In general, we recommend “noindex,follow" if you need to noindex a page.

What Other Meta Robots Tags Are There?

Now we’ve covered the anatomy of the most common meta robots tag, let’s take a look at some of the others:

• noimageindex: Tells the visiting crawler not to index any of the images on the page. Handy if you’ve got some proprietary images that you don’t want people finding on Google. Bear in mind that if someone links to an image, it can still be indexed.
• noarchive: This tag tells search engines not to show a cached version of the page.
• nosnippet: I genuinely can’t think of a viable use case for this one, but it stops search engines showing a snippet in the search results and stops them caching the page. If you can think of a reason to use this, ping me on Twitter @ben_johnston80.
• noodp: This tag was used to stop search engines using your DMOZ directory listing instead of your meta title/ description in search results. However, since DMOZ shut down last year, this tag has been depreciated. You might still see it in the wild, and there are some SEO plugins out there that still incorporate it for some reason, but just know that since the death of DMOZ, this tag does nothing.
• noydir: Another one that isn’t really of any use, but you’re likely to see in the wild and some SEO plugins push through – the noydir tag tells search engines not to show the snippet from the Yahoo! Directory. No search engines other than Yahoo! Use the Yahoo! Directory, and I’m not sure anyone has actually added their site to it since 2009, so it’s a genuinely useless tag.

When Should You Use Meta Robots Tags?

There are a number of reasons to use the meta tags over robots.txt, but the main one is the opportunity to deploy them on a page-by-page basis and have them followed. They are typically more effective than robots.txt and robots.txt works best when it’s used on a by-folder basis rather than a by-URL basis.

Essentially, if you need to exclude a specific page from the index, but want the links on that page to still be followed, or you have some images that you don’t want indexed but you still want the page’s content indexed, this is when you would use a meta robots tag. It’s an excellent, dynamic way of managing your site’s indexation (and there are loads of other things that you can do with them, but that’s another post).

But here’s the challenge: it’s really easy to add another line to your robots.txt file, but with some content management systems, it’s not that easy to add a meta tag to a specific page. Don’t worry, Google Tag Manager has you covered.

Adding Meta Robots Tags Through Google Tag Manager

If you have Google Tag Manager installed on your site to handle your tracking (and, seriously, why wouldn’t you?), you can use it to inject your meta robots tags on a page by page basis, thus eliminating the development overhead. Here’s how.

Firstly, create a new Custom HTML tag, incorporating the following code:

Replace YOURDIRECTIVE1, YOURDIRECTIVE2 with what you want it to do (noindex, follow, for example) and if you want to remove one of the directives, that’s fine. The screenshot below will show you how to do this.

Now create a trigger and set it to only fire on the pages you want the meta robots tag to apply to, as seen below.

And there you go, that’s how you can inject your meta robots tags through Google Tag Manager. Pretty handy, right?

And We’re Done

Hopefully today’s post has given you a better understanding of what meta robots tags are, what you’d use them for and how to use them. Any questions or comments, drop me a Tweet or send us a message through our contact form.