Microsoft ignores Google search console core web vitals. Should you?

A lot has been said about Google search console core web vitals – by Google! They claimed that if you didn’t get your website sorted out with excellent, across the board core vitals pass marks your website would be ranked poorly in Google search results. I for one took this to heart and after many months of struggle managed to attain a pass in mobile. It is much easier to pass core vitals on desktop.

This proud gif is for me 😃😎

So this website passes and gets pretty well 100% across the board. Great. I am proud of that. But a lot of website owners – specifically owners of very large websites – don’t give a damn about Google search console core web vitals.

Take the MSN website which republishes all the news stories from the online newspapers from Bing’s home page. Not sure how that works either as online newspapers that demand a subscription can be read on MSN’s news reporting pages for free.

Anyway, these MSN news pages fail Google search console core web vitals abysmally. Take a look at this screenshot of a randomly chosen page. I use the pagespeed.web.dev website to measure pages against Google core vitals standards.

Microsoft scores very badly on Google search engine core vitals
Microsoft scores very badly on Google search engine core vitals. Click on the image to see it larger if you wish.

Looking at that result, there is an argument that states that core vitals are pretty well meaningless and website owners shouln’t bother breaking their backs in trying to meet these near impossible standards for mobiles. The MSN performance ranks at a messly 25% – very poor indeed. INP is poor in mobile.

I mean very few websites achieve what I have achieved! I am boasting. But you’ll see that my website is very plain and lightweight with no sidebars. No sidebars helps quite a lot.

And, by the way, I found that no sidebars does not really impact a websites hit rate. But it might damage it a bit on the number of pages viewed.

The big point it this: despite my excellent core vitals score, I saw no advantages in Google search results. Google’s new algorithym still almost destroyed my site. It fell like a stone as was the case with a large number of other websites.

Microsoft if big enough to ignore core vitals. They are not dependent on Google search results it seems to me.

But it also seems that not everyone has taken on board what Google has said about ensuring that your site should pass mobile core vitals. INP and CLS proved the hardest for me to pass. But I get a 100% on performance these days and have done for a while now.

My gut feel is that Google search engine core vitals are not as ‘vital’ as Google says they are. You can fail their difficult test and still get decent search engine results. There are many other perhaps more important factors dictating search results rankings.

That holy grail of a perfect core vitals score should not, it seems, be concering website owners as much as you might have believed.

Lastly Google search engine core vitals are a technical test. As a internet user you will not see any discernible difference between a website will excellent core vtials and one with poor core vitals. The core vitals test is very abstract, almost academic and unreal.

Google says that core vitals are important to ensure that the user enjoys the experience when visiting a website but I respectfully disagree. I don’t see the difference between websites that are good and bad for core vitals.

Maybe Google realises this. Perhaps they simply want to do their bit as managers of the internet (!) to force website owners to up their standards. They want to weed out the poorer sites.

I also believe that Google wants to shrink the internet to make it more manageable. It is too clogged up with dross with remarkably 1.5 billion websites. The world wide web was never meant to be like this.

1 thought on “Microsoft ignores Google search console core web vitals. Should you?”

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