It looks like Google is going to start explicitly labelling slow sites as such in their search results (much like they recently started explicitly labelling mobile-friendly sites). So far it’s limited to Google’s own properties but it could be expanded.
Personally, I think this is a fair move. If the speed of a site were used to rank sites differently, I think that might be going too far. But giving the user advanced knowledge and leaving the final decision up to them …that feels good.
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.
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.
What happens when you’re AMP pages are slower than your regular pages …but you’re forced to use AMP anyway if you want to appear in the top stories carousel.
AMP isn’t about speed. It’s about control.
The elephant in the room here is pre-rendering: that’s why Google aren’t using page speed alone as a determining factor for what goes in the carousel.
An excellent, thorough, even-handed analysis of AMP’s performance from Tim. The AMP format doesn’t make that much of a difference, the AMP cache does speed things up (as would any CDN), but it’s the pre-rendering that really delivers the performance boost …as long as you give up your URLs.
But right now, the incentives being placed on AMP content seem to be accomplishing exactly what you would think: they’re incentivizing AMP, not performance.
This is very good news indeed—Google are going to allow non-AMP pages to get the same prioritised treatment as AMP pages …if they comply with the kind of performance criteria that Tim outlined.
It’ll take time to get there, but I’m so, so glad to see that Google aren’t going to try to force everyone to use their own proprietary format.
We are taking what we learned from AMP, and are working on web standards that will allow instant loading for non-AMP web content. We hope this work will also unlock AMP-like embeddability that powers Google Search features like the Top Stories carousel.
I just hope that this alternate route to the carousel won’t get lumped under the banner of “AMP”—that term has been pretty much poisoned at this point.
A proposal to tackle the injustice of Google AMP pages receiving preferential treatment in Google search results.
But AMP doesn’t trust us.