Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazypython | Hacker News Reader

> That'll probably just get you penalized by Google Search...

Then don't add it for Googlebot User-Agents or IPs.

That's not sufficient. Google checks for different behavior for sites read from Google and sites read from other sources.

They'll drop content like a rotten egg from search results of they see a discrepancy.

Yeah but I really doubt they're using latency discrepancy as a signal. I can think of plenty of ways poor latency could come up on their verification requests but not affect the normal Googlebot requests. Also that's not really something any black hat SEO would involve so Google doesn't really have an incentive to look for that in the first place.

I think you missed my point.

If you and/or your organization can keep up with all of that... then good for you. That's not the reality for most of the world. And in "world", I include most IT organizations, btw.

EDIT: Btw, do note that I'm not even sure if the alleged issues/problems are even intentional or not... and that in itself is problematic... which was my larger point.

I don't have any solutions.

With the upcoming Core Web Vitals, you'll get penalized for this. It measures the aggregate speed of chrome users.

This is already a prominent section of Google's search console and they fire off warnings with with the perceived issues which you validate after fixing, etc. I'm sure it will become a major factor very soon.

Google probably crawls with non-Googlebot User-Agent strings periodically to test if sites are serving different content to Googlebot and regular browsers.

I have no insider knowledge, but I'm going to guess that they even crawl using actual Chrome browsers once in a while... and penalize deviations from what you serve to the GoogleBot... and also factor in response times for either.

I don't think any single person can predict/know what's actually going on at this point.

But this mitigation would still fail. They might test for different content, but they probably don't include a periodic test like this in their timing tests, and if they did, it would just be an outlier.

In google search console, you can see lighthouse data reported from actual google chrome instances of real users. (I can’t verify this right now)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com