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Google SEO Accelerated Mobile Pages and Fighting Back Problems
Top web developers and thought leaders together published a site called AMPletter.org. The page is a simple letter outlining some situations and concerns about the Google AMP project.
I see such 'open letters' from time to time. Some I agree with, but do not bother to support. For others it may not be a lack of agreement, but a lack of real significance compels my support.
But AMP is different.
Since it was introduced 2.5 years ago I have seen issues. At the same time I appreciate what Google's public intentions are.
It is good to know that I am not alone and some of my teammates band together to articulate the issue clearly and politely.
A few years ago the Google search team set out to improve the web. Like me, they all see poor development practices being promoted. These bad practices make the web slow and provide a poor consumer experience.
How often do you start reading an article, only to jump down this page. Then as soon as you do injustice to read where you were, it jumps back?
I hate him too
It is a product of poor development and UX. Low-quality third party content, aka advertising, most of these lead to poor experiences.
ArsTechnica explained some common objections to AMP in an article about AMP support to Bing.
"While there is widespread acceptance that AMP is addressing real problems - the abundance of trackers, advertisements and client-side scripts make many webpages bandwidth-heavy and slow to load - on many proprietary, Google-controlled extensions within the industry Are unhappy., About him as his for the open web. "
The rise of the fast food framework also contributes to a poor user experience. The heavy load of JavaScript blocks critical rendering, slowing down page load. Actually the average page takes 19 seconds to load on mobile devices.
Google has a vested interest in the success of the web. The mobile load time of 19 seconds is only an indicator. Since mobile is a major consumer device today, there is a huge difference in speed.
So Google created AMP as a way to fix the common problems they promote around the web.
The goal is to make the web great again, but Google controls everything.
In short, they have lost confidence in businesses employing competent web developers and implementing promotions for them and other companies.
Instead of relying on his campaign, he said screw it, we will do it just for you. As a reward for letting Google present and host your content, AMP gets high profile search result placement for ages
The problem is two-fold.
If it is an AMP page then you only get preferential placement.
And
AMPpages are hosted and managed by Google.
They are actually served from a Google domain. Today it is either a sub-folder of Google.com or a sub-domain of ampproject.org.
By no means is it your domain, which damages your branding effort.
Originally AMP relied on polymers as a JavaScript library to present specialized web components. Today, I think he abandoned the polymer project and built it in his own library.
Publishers can still maintain their existing, very slow and poor user experience, websites, but they must also have a parallel AMP version.
By doing this Google consumes the AMP era and hosts them on Google web servers. Consumers are greeted with special search placements for these AMP eras. But instead of going to publishers' URLs, they are sent to Google URLs.
The main idea is to make the web faster and provide a better user experience. Google knows how to do this, but instead of advising companies on how to deliver these experiences, they are simply grabbing their content and doing so themselves.
In essence you are creating content for Google and not for your brand.
This is not 100% appropriate. The Chrome team does a great job developing web development best practices. Unfortunately their reach is limited in my view.
Not for lack of available content, but because 99% of developers simply don't care.
And Google passes in your canonical URL with some 'link jus' and allows some minor branding to be carried along.
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AMP in SEO
Search engine marketers are on the fence about AMP. The way it works is not a choice, but it can help discover whatever offers it offers. But is it really good search placement when traffic never hits your site, and you have no way to monetize the content?
As I study the SEO world and their opinions about AMP, I think they would like to see it. Instead of AMP, the ability to achieve better rankings should apply to better experiences.
And honestly, this is what Google wants for better search rankings, a good user experience. Because Google has so much web content that they can analyze it and determine what consumers really want.
At this point we know that Google uses about 200 different criteria to rank pages and search results.
Google also uses machine learning as a major part of ranking algorithms these days. This means that there are probably thousands upon thousands of other ranking factors.
But it all boils down, do customers really want to read what you've published?
You can correct all technical things, but if your content is worthless they will bounce back and move on to the next result.
You can write the best content in the world, but if you fail on the majority of technical aspects, the same happens, the customer bounces back and chooses another option.
And here is the main thing…
We know that the pages have to load within three seconds or you have lost half the people clicking on your link. Not only are you wasting money, but your building is a bad brand reputation.
When this happens both Google and your brand suffer. This is because they put their recommendation on you and you failed to give. By not offering the best results, they are tarnishing their brand because of your bad experience.
This is why Google created AMP. There is a way to effectively save the web because they do not feel that publishers are ready to do so.
So what is the real problem?
Well it is a combination to be honest. First of all, publishers, and by this I mean newspapers and news sites for the most part, rely too much on third-party advertising services. Although I have no problem trying to monetize their content through advertising services, the quality of the services is still very poor.
As I analyze hundreds upon hundreds of web page waterfall news sites consistently fail miserably.
They often require several hundred requests and mountains of unnecessary and poorly written JavaScript. This is why pages often jump around and take forever to load.
Nobody likes it.
Can the web run faster?
Of course it can.
The makers of ampletter.org also want to prove the same thing.
These are my friends and influencers. And we / they know how to load websites instantly.
We had been doing this for years. And we try to help you.
So how do we know how to build websites fast?
Three things:
1. We listen to what the browser team and search teams tell us
2. We analyze real data like search engines
3. We get our elbow dirty writing code and test it
We know that third-party script is the worst thing on the Internet today. So we try to avoid them.
We also know why these scripts are bad and we offer solutions and improvements, but this is often ignored.
We also know the cost of the fast food framework and focus on using cleaner code.
What is the main point of AMPLetter.org?
If you read this, they have no problem promoting AMP by Google. And neither do I.
You see that is not the problem. Actually it's a good thing.
However, Google should not require you to host your pages on the Google web server. You should be free to implement AMP on your own server and serve from your own domain.
What about those of us who can load a good, fast user experience?
This is the main point of the entire letter.
Those of us who know how to load pages quickly should receive the same preference as AMP pages.
Just because we do not use AMP, which is over 200 kB of JavaScript, and hosting our pages on Google servers does not mean that we cannot load webpages immediately.
Can AMP do anything?
What is one of the first things introduced in his tutorial? How to use amp image tag.
My impression is that this tag is used by their server to consume your image and convert it into a responsive image array. Part of the process also optimizes the image file size.
That's exactly what I do with my sites.
They are all responsible if you take the time to view any images of this site. For the past one or two years I have used responsive images and run them through an image optimization service.
There are other performance improvements that the AMP project provides. They all conform to the best practices that I have promoted for the last 10 or so years.
In fact, all my friends are in conformity with the recommendations.
Identifying the display KPI as a display signal
One of the final points the AMP letter makes is to identify a standard set of performance measurements we can use to determine if a page loads faster.
They recommend using KPI SpeedIndex created by Google Chrome engineer Patrick Meen for WebPageTest.org.
I think Google already has some standardized tests that we can use. We can also make them part of our automated testing process as they are accessible through node modules.
These tests are a standard for Google Page Speedtest, SEO for reference, and Lighthouse Project.
Speed testing is a tool presented by the Google search team and has some good tests and responses. I do not agree with the criteria 100%, but it is a good test.
Lighthouse is an evolution of performance audit in Chrome Developer Tools. Today it has 4 main areas to test, progressive web apps, accessibility, performance and best practice. I think Lighthouse is a more thorough test.
The actual performance metric or set of metrics would be the best solution in my view, because then everyone can focus on accomplishing those goals and knowing where they currently stand.
Problem with wall content garden
This is another area of dispute with my AMP. Actually I have this problem with Facebook and Apple too.
With the enormous effort of these companies we have the materials they make themselves and "wall off" from the outside world.
AMP pages are hosted on a Google server and are served from the Google domain. This means that Google owns these content.
Have you considered Facebook?
Facebook is the app that people use on their mobile devices. There is no question about it. Facebook has around 80% mobile device screen time.
But is Facebook really "app-like"?
Facebook is really just a proprietary browser using a proprietary markup syntax called JSX.
Industry analysts have gone so far as to point out this. The difference is that Facebook has its own content and structure. They curate your news feed content in a very controlled way.
For example, did you know that the content in your newsfeed is only 4-6% of the actual content of your friends and the pages you follow?
Facebook wants to force business owners to promote their content through Facebook ads.
Imagine what you would actually see if you took an un-filtered newsfeed. It would be great the noise would be honest.
Maybe you can see how the giants of each of these industry are trying to create their own curated and closed world in the content world. Where the obvious goal is to never give up their qualities.
Google has not yet done this with AMP, but I can see how that could be the direction.
This worries me a bit at this point. I would have been more worried if it had seemed more aggressive.
For what it's worth, Google Mobile does not support the first index AMP pages. Which I find very ironic, because where most of the performance continues, mobile devices. This may change this year as Google is replacing mobile first in the index and overriding the legacy desktop index.
The conclusion
These are my issues and concerns about AMP.
Now ask yourself is this good for the web?
Knowing that people like me, my friends, letter creators and other people who have signed on to me know how to create sites that load instantly, do you think our assets and projects are emp Should not get the same benefit as?
And what about the standardization of measuring index?
I will leave that open-ended conclusion so that you can ponder it and possibly share it with me on social media such as Twitter and Facebook.
What do you think about AMP?
Do you think AMP pages should receive preferential treatment in search engine results?
Or do you think that maybe Google should increase the weight given to any fast loading page in its search engine algorithm?
What do you think Google should do with AMP?
What do you understand by AMP letter?
If you feel like me and many others, I invite you to make and receive a request and add your name to the list.