As Antitrust Pressure Mounts, Google to Pull Back Benefit to News Sites That Adopted Its Preferred Mobile Technology – The Markup

Everything about SEO is obnoxious – Chris Coyier

No argument from me.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Timing for bringing page experience to Google Search

Good news: as of May 2021, page speed (or core web vitals, if you must) will be a ranking factor in Google Search.

Even better news: at the same time, Google AMP will lose its unfairly privileged position in the top stories carousel. Hopefully this marks the beginning of the end for Google’s failed experiment in forcing publishers to use their tech.

Feds may target Google’s Chrome browser for breakup - POLITICO

The unfair collusion between Google AMP and Google Search might just bite ‘em on the ass.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Evaluating page experience for a better web

This is excellent news for sites that were strong-armed into creating AMP pages just to get into the Top Stories carousel:

As part of this update, we’ll also incorporate the page experience metrics into our ranking criteria for the Top Stories feature in Search on mobile, and remove the AMP requirement from Top Stories eligibility.

This update doesn’t arrive until next year, but the message is clear: fast websites will be rewarded in search. I’ll be glad to see an end to AMP’s blackmail tactics.

Cake or death: AMP and the worrying power dynamics of the web | Andrew Betts

Andrew looks at AMP from a technical, UX, and commercial perspective. It looks pretty bad in all three areas. And the common thread is the coercion being applied to publishers.

But casting the web aside and pushing a new proprietary content format (which is optional, but see coercion) seems like an extraordinarily heavy handed way to address it. It’s like saying I see you have a graze on your knee so let’s chop off and replace your whole leg. Instead, we could use the carrot of a premium search result position (as AMP has done) and make it only possible to be there if your site is fast.

He’s absolutely right about how it sounds when the AMP team proudly talk about how many publishers are adopting their framework, as if the framework were actually standing on its own merits instead of being used to blackmail publishers:

It is utterly bizarre to me, akin to a street robber that has convinced himself that people just randomly like giving him their money and has managed to forget the fact that he’s holding a gun to their head.