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Google's John Mueller, with a tad of annoyance, posted on Twitter that "lighthouse scores do not affect Google Search." He then shares a tweet about people cloaking and cheating their lighthouse scores as a scam to trick Google.
Here is John's tweet:
Lighthouse scores do not affect Google Search.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 26, 2021
Doing this kind of user-agent cloaking is a terrible idea - you're just deceiving yourself. It makes absolutely no sense, and prevents you from finding real issues. If you run across a plugin that does this, report it to the CMS. https://t.co/yCoaYduHU4
John wrote, as you can see, "Doing this kind of user-agent cloaking is a terrible idea - you're just deceiving yourself. It makes absolutely no sense, and prevents you from finding real issues. If you run across a plugin that does this, report it to the CMS."
Colin Bendell, a Performance Engineering at Shopify wrote:
Code obfuscation is a strong smell that a dev is trying to hide something dishonest, and is likely hurting your business. Fire that team.
— Colin Bendell (@colinbendell) August 26, 2021
More examples of lighthouse UA sniffing that is actually making things slower: pic.twitter.com/G9VkN9ccOx
Google has often downplayed Lighthouse metrics for SEO over the years.
This thread on Twitter is super interesting, here are some responses that caught my eye:
Google is partly to blame for this IMO. They've created such hysteria with their CWV update that site owners are scrambling to get a perfect Lighthouse scores in order to stay relevant, and so far these shady "SEO" tools seem to be working...
— Miriam Schwab (@miriamschwab) August 29, 2021
Malte Ubl is a Googler:
Most SEOs don't understand the lighthouse scores don't directly relate to your page speed scores even prior to the page experience roll out.
— Kristine Schachinger (@schachin) August 26, 2021
So stop fooling yourself.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
