John Mueller, Google Search Advocate, invalidates the idea that a website’s SEO can be negatively impacted by HTTP/3.
During the November 2022 edition of Google SEO office-hours, joined by the Google Search Relations team, Mueller answers a question about if the use of HTTP/3 improve SEO since it makes the website quicker and more secure.
And it’s as follows:
“Could the use of HTTP/3 improve SEO because it improves performance?”
Mueller starts his answer by saying that HTTP/3 is not used by Google as a ranking factor or in web crawling:
“Google doesn’t use HTTP/3 as a factor in ranking at the moment. As far as I know, we don’t use it in crawling either.”
For web crawling, Google uses principally HTTP/1. For HTTP/2, Googlebot supports it only when there is a significant advantage over HTTP/1.
HTTP/3 support won’t likely arrive soon. Websites that adopt it early will not see a direct increase in their search rankings.
According to Mueller:
“In terms of performance, I suspect the gains users see from using HTTP/3 would not be enough to significantly affect the core web vitals, which are the metrics that we use in the page experience ranking factor. While making a faster server is always a good idea, I doubt you’d see a direct connection with SEO only from using HTTP/3. Similar to how you’d be hard pressed to finding a direct connection to using a faster kind of RAM in your servers.”
Mueller said that HTTP/3 could “potentially indirectly” affect Core Web Vitals. And we all know that Core Web Vitals have a direct impact on a website’s SEO.
Here is his answer in the video below: