Baldur Bjarnason
“Adactio: Links—The Shape Of The Machine « blarg?” adactio.com/links/17139
The Shape Of The Machine « blarg?
On AMP:
Google could have approached the “be better on mobile” problem, search optimization and revenue sharing any number of ways, obviously, but the one they’ve chosen and built out is the one that guarantees that either you let them middleman all of your traffic or they cut off your oxygen.
There’s also this observation, which is spot-on:
Google has managed to structure this surveillance-and-value-extraction machine entirely out of people who are convinced that they, personally, are doing good for the world. The stuff they’re working on isn’t that bad – we’ve got such beautiful intentions!
Responses
Related links
What happened when we disabled Google AMP at Tribune Publishing?
Shockingly little. So you should try it, too.
RFC 8752 - Report from the IAB Workshop on Exploring Synergy between Content Aggregation and the Publisher Ecosystem (ESCAPE)
During the workshop, several online publishers indicated that if it weren’t for the privileged position in the Google Search carousel given to AMP content, they would not publish in that format.
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.
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.
Related posts
Ampvisory
I have been elected to the AMP advisory committee. My reign of terror begins!
Opening up the AMP cache
A proposal to tackle the injustice of Google AMP pages receiving preferential treatment in Google search results.
In AMP we trust
But AMP doesn’t trust us.
AMPstinction
Thinking about the end game.