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Google’s Page Speed Update does not impact indexing

In response to questions raised in the community, here's clarification about how indexing is impacted by the Google Page Speed Update.

Barry Schwartz on January 31, 2018 at 4:06 pm

Google’s Page Speed Update won’t impact how Google indexes your mobile or desktop content; it will only affect how the mobile pages are ranked in the Google mobile search results. To be clear, indexing and ranking are two separate things, as Google explains clearly in the How Search Works portal.

We are covering this again because there appears to be some confusion around the Page Speed Update and whether it will impact indexing. Both John Mueller and Gary Illyes of Google chimed in to explain that this specific algorithm will have no impact on indexing.

Here are those tweets:

The mobile speed update affects only ranking in mobile search results; it's independent of the indexing.

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) January 31, 2018

Why would indexing be related to speed? (I'm kinda confused how this was connected, wonder if we need to update something on our side to make it clearer)

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) January 31, 2018

Slow pages can get into the index. The speed update is a ranking change that has no direct effect on indexing.

— Gary “鯨理” Illyes (@methode) January 31, 2018

We have a large FAQs on the Page Speed update algorithm that Google will be releasing in July. So please make sure to read up on that.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.