In 2021, Google said that Core Web Vitals may also be graded based on pages on your site that are noindexed. Well, that is no longer the case according to an updated Google help document. A page that has noindex on it will no longer be factored into your Core Web Vitals and Google Page Experience scores.
The document now says "Any page will not meet the discoverability requirement if any of the following conditions are met, including root pages for the origin dataset: The page is served with an HTTP X-Robots-Tag: noindex header or equivalent. The document includes a meta name="robots" content="noindex" meta tag or equivalent."
This was spotted by Mike Blazer on Twitter:
It's old news, mate. Noindex pages do not impact CWV anymore. https://t.co/tVfswvKx8O pic.twitter.com/2hXBQaindY
— Mike Blazer 🇺🇦 (@MikeBlazerX) July 27, 2022
So should you noindex slow pages? Probably not, instead make them faster. But there is no need to panic about the core web vitals score on noindexed pages and in general, I wouldn't panic about core web vitals in general but that is me.
Brodie noted this caveat:
Noindex pages do not get their own CrUX data that’s true, however they can still impact the whole origin-level CWV score and for sites with insufficient traffic for page-level data, this may be the only score available in CrUX.https://t.co/LLMQoNIhQc pic.twitter.com/Vdvep4PNlw
— Barry Pollard (@tunetheweb) July 29, 2022
Forum discussion at Twitter.
