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Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

danielmiessler.com

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Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#131

Post by ehsankia »

CaptSpify wrote: post #111
xd1936 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. They reward sites that load fast. They also offer AMP as another way to speed sites up, which in turn makes them rise in rankings. But Google offers a large suite of tools to help web developers speed up their websites.

I hear this a lot, but whenever I search for something common like lyrics or weather, I get only large bloated webpages, while the lightweight and simple ones are nowhere to be found. Unless Google opens up their reasoning for ranking, I genuinely don't believe they add enough weight to load-times.

Huh, what? What site do you get? I always get azlyrics which is a fairly simple and clean site. EVery other one I tried seems more bloated.

Obviously, there's many other factors at play. SEO is a complicated world, especially in such a crowded place as song lyrics. Though I noticed Google actually has an inline box for lyrics now which avoids the issue entirely.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#132

Post by ehsankia »

CaptSpify wrote: post #111
xd1936 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. They reward sites that load fast. They also offer AMP as another way to speed sites up, which in turn makes them rise in rankings. But Google offers a large suite of tools to help web developers speed up their websites.

I hear this a lot, but whenever I search for something common like lyrics or weather, I get only large bloated webpages, while the lightweight and simple ones are nowhere to be found. Unless Google opens up their reasoning for ranking, I genuinely don't believe they add enough weight to load-times.

Huh, what? What site do you get? I always get azlyrics which is a fairly simple and clean site. EVery other one I tried seems more bloated.

Obviously, there's many other factors at play. SEO is a complicated world, especially in such a crowded place as song lyrics. Though I noticed Google actually has an inline box for lyrics now which avoids the issue entirely.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#133

Post by ocdtrekkie »

mikewhy wrote: post #70
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the beautiful thing is, RSS feeds load quickly with no scripts, embedded ads, or tracking, and isn't tied to any proprietary cloud service provider. More and more I am convinced Google convinces everyone to move away from things just so they can "reinvent" them down the line in a more proprietary fashion.

There totally are RSS feeds with ads and tracking.

I mean, sure, you can put like... text ads in an RSS feed, and I'm sure you can throw a tracking link as a link to click on in there. But unless you click into the page from the RSS feed, you aren't going to be picking up any stray cookies or have any scripts running on your computer. Browsing an RSS reader is very fast, and has very little bloat.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#134

Post by bastawhiz »

steffenweber wrote: post #6

Google should reward fast / jank-free websites instead of rewarding websites that use one particular technology (AMP). On SERPs, both the "flash" icon and the AMP carousel are AMP-exclusive which suggests that Google is abusing its market power.

AMP pages can be tested and proven to load fast. There's no way to guarantee that a non-AMP page will be fast for a user. The way AMP is designed allows Google to inspect the source and determine whether the page meets the requirements or not. Caching the page guarantees that the content Google tests is the content the user gets.

Imagine if Google rewarded plain old websites the same way they reward AMP sites. You'd have sites gaming the system by hiding ads and disabling web fonts just to get ranked higher, then taking a crap on "real" users visiting the site.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#135

Post by fivre »

superkuh wrote: post #115

Cloudflare is doing this AMP crap too. If a cloudflare user enables AMP on his site then links from their domain to yours will trigger a visit of Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Cloudflare-AMP/1.0; + https://amp.cloudflare.com/bot ) AppleWebKit/534.34" which then mirrors the content from your domain and re-hosts it on Cloudflare servers. Then whenever someone goes to the Cloudflare user's website and clicks a link to your w…

Requests from non-user accounts do still get responses, just not quickly. You may have more luck with Twitter.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#136

Post by CaptSpify »

ehsankia wrote: post #131
CaptSpify wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this a lot, but whenever I search for something common like lyrics or weather, I get only large bloated webpages, while the lightweight and simple ones are nowhere to be found. Unless Google opens up their reasoning for ranking, I genuinely don't believe they add enough weight to load-times.

Huh, what? What site do you get? I always get azlyrics which is a fairly simple and clean site. EVery other one I tried seems more bloated. Obviously, there's many other factors at play. SEO is a complicated world, especially in such a crowded place as song lyrics. Though I noticed Google actually has an inline box for lyrics now which avoids the issue entirely.

azlyrics is far from what I would consider simple or clean. It took over 30s to load for me and had way too much junk on the page.

Yes, there are many factors, and I clearly don't know all of them. I definitely see the problem that Google's inline (or amp) is trying to solve, but I think encouraging the right sites to grow to the top is a much better solution.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#137

Post by jansenv »

kowdermeister wrote: post #3

If you share an AMP page it will indeed link to Google's CDN but if you click it it immediately redirects to the full article on desktop: http://i.imgur.com/43i9X4e.png The full URL is still part of the shared link, so not much of a value has been lost, but the gain (speed boost) still outperforms this "inconvenience". I don't really feel the hatred against AMP, it works as intended and for me as an end user that's a…

I really like AMP. As a web company, it reduces our hosting costs and is a cheater way to improve the rankings of our sites.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#138

Post by IgorPartola »

It is one of the most annoying things to use, and might actually get me to switch my default search engine. I often search for stuff where the results come up on Reddit. I want to see the comments, but AMP helpfully hides all replies, and only shows like the top 5-10 comments. This is useless. So now instead of getting to the page I want right away, I have to scroll down to the button that says "see more comments". WTF?

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#139

Post by [deleted] »

CaptSpify wrote: post #136
ehsankia wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, what? What site do you get? I always get azlyrics which is a fairly simple and clean site. EVery other one I tried seems more bloated. Obviously, there's many other factors at play. SEO is a complicated world, especially in such a crowded place as song lyrics. Though I noticed Google actually has an inline box for lyrics now which avoids the issue entirely.

azlyrics is far from what I would consider simple or clean. It took over 30s to load for me and had way too much junk on the page. Yes, there are many factors, and I clearly don't know all of them. I definitely see the problem that Google's inline (or amp) is trying to solve, but I think encouraging the right sites to grow to the top is a much better solution.

[deleted]

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#140

Post by x1798DE »

mynegation wrote: post #13

It got annoying enough for me to switch my search to bing.com everywhere, including Google's own browser. My two main complaints: 1. Once I am on AMP page, most of the time I want to click around the site and I cannot do that - feels like a cage. 2. URL obfuscates the site name and article title (not completely, but definitely adds visual noise)

I don't think I've ever seen an AMP page on a google search result, so either I'm searching for very different things than you are, or there's some browser configuration that doesn't show tons of AMP sites on Google.

I usually browse with JS off (though I think not on Google) and the standard suite of privacy apps - uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, etc, and I usually use the version of Google with Instant disabled. Maybe that helps.

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