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How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

markosaric.com

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Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#411

Post by snowwrestler »

thereisnospork wrote: post #403
buboard wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it also does make the web faster this is true > That is why AMP has been successful This is not. If google removes ranking incentive, people will forget about AMP the next day

>> That is why AMP has been successful >This is not. If google removes ranking incentive, people will forget about AMP the next day Google giving ranking incentive to sites that are faster seems like the exact sort of thing they should be doing.

Google already incorporates site speed into their rankings, separate from AMP.

However, if you want to get into Google's mobile carousel above the normal search results, you have to serve AMP pages and let Google cache them.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#412

Post by progval »

thereisnospork wrote: post #403
buboard wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it also does make the web faster this is true > That is why AMP has been successful This is not. If google removes ranking incentive, people will forget about AMP the next day

>> That is why AMP has been successful >This is not. If google removes ranking incentive, people will forget about AMP the next day Google giving ranking incentive to sites that are faster seems like the exact sort of thing they should be doing.

Except that it's now giving a huge boost to websites that use a specific technology to be fast; instead of just boosting all fast websites like it used to. Sites can be fast even if they don't use AMP.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#413

Post by shawnz »

superkuh wrote: post #96
bytematic wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, use google amp and get higher rankings and it can increase your traffic by hundreds to thousands to millions. I hate it but its how it works

Higher rankings and google will preload the amp page they have and their servers for the amp link. That's why it is a tiny bit faster. It has nothing to do with the amp spec itself. It's faster because google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load.

I think the idea is that preloading wouldn't be feasible with arbitrary unrestricted HTML because of security concerns, which is why they created this restricted subset in the first place.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#414

Post by esrauch »

JoshMnem wrote: post #399
gregable wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand the 8 second CSS animation in the AMP boilerplate. Here's the code (simplified): body { animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,end) 0s 1 normal both} @keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}} body{animation:none} See the noscript section: if javascript is disabled, the CSS displays the body immediately. If Javascript is enabled, but for some reason the AMP javascript fails to loa…

The 8-second delay is there to punish users who block JavaScript that is loaded from Google's servers (with ad-blockers) but still have JavaScript enabled.

I think that's a bit unnecessarily tin-foil-hat. If they didn't put in the 8 second css rule it would just show blank for those users right? So adding that rule is making it work at all instead which doesn't sound like "there to punish them".

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#415

Post by shawnz »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #397
joshuamorton wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way though? Like that's super generic and not particularly meaningful without a more concrete explanation.

No, there's nothing like super generic about it. Google has a de facto monopoly on site rankings, which gives it de facto editorial control over the content of the Internet down to a very fine level. If Google decides to drop a site from search, that site loses traffic and is effectively removed from visibility. This is not a user choice. Users do not to get to say "Well, that site is too slow for me, so I won't visi…

What you're arguing against is opaque site rankings. But what does that have to do with AMP as a technology? How does AMP enable them to have more opaque rankings than before? All the control you're talking about is something they'd have regardless of the existence of AMP.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#416

Post by azylman »

buboard wrote: post #368
gregable wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few references listed in this article: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/performance/why-site-spe... - Mobify found that decreasing their homepage's load time by 100 milliseconds resulted in a 1.11% uptick in session-based conversion - Retailer AutoAnything experienced a 12-13% increase in sales after cutting page load time in half - Walmart discovered that improving page load time by one second increased convers…

those statements sound like incredible cherrypicking does 1.11% sound a lot an is it statistically significant? cut page in half from what to what? from 30 to 15 seconds? or from 2 to 1? improving one second like how? from 12 to 11 or from 2 to 1? and is 2% really substantial?

Large companies spend a LOT of money trying to increase conversions by even tenths of a percent. Yes, 2% is substantial.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#417

Post by 4ntonius8lock »

munk-a wrote: post #389
gregable wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand the 8 second CSS animation in the AMP boilerplate. Here's the code (simplified): body { animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,end) 0s 1 normal both} @keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}} body{animation:none} See the noscript section: if javascript is disabled, the CSS displays the body immediately. If Javascript is enabled, but for some reason the AMP javascript fails to loa…

This will hit a lot of people on the web today that have given up on a blanket block on JS (because a lot of pure text content simply fails to render without JS, yaaaaay) but do have a blanket blacklist on JS assets and whitelist requests on a need basis.

As intended. We desperately need some anticompetitive scrutiny on google.

Unfortunately... https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=d000067823

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#418

Post by OrgNet »

gregable wrote: post #355
ogre_codes wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which conveniently ensures that the only way you can effectively monetize AMP articles is via Google's own advertising networks which don't have constraints on running javascript.

See the list of natively supported Ad networks in AMP: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-ad/#supported-a... There are about 200 in that list and any network can submit a config to be added, it's just a pull request away.

so AMP is like the play store but for advertisers?

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#419

Post by wruza »

system2 wrote: post #406
kccqzy wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They load massively faster than normal sites, especially on poor mobile connections where main sites sometimes hang indefinitely trying to load javascript, ads, etc. Have you tried the normal mobile websites with an adblocker?

Good luck doing it on mobile phone. I'd say 99.99% users out there on mobile never even attempted to use another browser than safari or chrome for ios.

I’m using safari + adguard (an app that injects adblock rules into it) and pretty sure that I see no ads. Except on few sites that usually try to push it even through desktop uBO anyway. Even no youtube ads, idk how they do it.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#420

Post by Udik »

thereisnospork wrote: post #403
buboard wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it also does make the web faster this is true > That is why AMP has been successful This is not. If google removes ranking incentive, people will forget about AMP the next day

>> That is why AMP has been successful >This is not. If google removes ranking incentive, people will forget about AMP the next day Google giving ranking incentive to sites that are faster seems like the exact sort of thing they should be doing.

> Google giving ranking incentive to sites that are faster seems like the exact sort of thing they should be doing.

Really? I thought Google's purpose was to find information in the web, not to give me fast links. If I am looking for an article, I want that article, not a different but faster one. If I am looking for a piece of information, I want the best fit, not the second or third best but faster fit.

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