Malte Ubl, a Technically a Software Engineer at Google, said he won't be talking about any efforts around abuse and spam prevention for the upcoming Google Page Experience update. Specifically how some may try to fake the Chrome User Experience Report (CRUX) data for better or worse to manipulate rankings of their own site or competitors.
As you know, the Google Page Experience Update is coming up in May 2021 and a lot of it is based on the core web vitals metrics of Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Some are trying to outsmart Google and fake the metrics in order to give their own sites a better score or to give their competitor sites a worse score.
Malte said on Twitter "I'm definitely concerned about abuse. But I will not say what if anything we are doing to address it as this is naturally a cat and mouse game."
Here are some of the tweets that led up to this response:
You are talking to the wrong person about cheating G. Fortunately your cheat doesn't work (I'm pretty sure; note, that a page can have multiple LCP candidates and the last is picked), and if it does it will stop working in the future.
— Malte Ubl (@cramforce) February 22, 2021
That sounds like abuse
— Malte Ubl (@cramforce) February 22, 2021
I'm definitely concerned about abuse. But I will not say what if anything we are doing to address it as this is naturally a cat and mouse game.
— Malte Ubl (@cramforce) February 22, 2021
I suspect Google will have something ready for any manipulation around this. But I also suspect the overall weight of the page experience update will be relatively light.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
