6 ms·

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. The reason to use AMP is SEO. If you want literally any benefit other than SEO, just improve the performance on your own mobile site. T

by untog 9y ago

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. The reason to use AMP is SEO. If you want literally any benefit other than SEO, just improve the performance on your own mobile site. Then you won't have to jump through weird hoops and come up with entirely new "magic carpet" user flows, because you'll actually control your own content on your own site. The talk attached to this Medium piece was given at "TechSEO Boost", but the article itself dances around ever using the term. So we're left to wonder why AirBnb is very worried about being able to link users to their native app, while they apparently don't care at all about whether users are using their web site. It's because of SEO. > the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, which has some powerful backers including Google > It would be fair to say that Google has been a very vocal supporter of the initiative from day one. These are really weird ways of describing a Google-owned, Google-pushed initiative.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
> The reason to use AMP is SEO. If you want literally any benefit other than SEO, just improve the performance on your own mobile site. It's a growth hack to get better organic search traffic, with user experience performance improvements a secondary concern.
- untog 9y ago
  My point is that you wouldn't know it from the article. It makes it sound like you should implement AMP for user experience and fast loading, despite then going on to detail the ways in which it compromises user experience. When a big company like Airbnb jumps on a technology bandwagon people notice, and write-ups like this influence the choices other organisations make. They could at least just be upfront about the reasons why they're doing it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    The reason Airbnb is not likely to be upfront about why they're doing it, is it's very unlikely that Airbnb wants to admit they're probably being paid for it or getting some other form of special consideration for writing this. The search benefit isn't even a long-term one: Either AMP will go away for some reason at some point, or, if the status quo is maintained, everyone will be forced to use AMP by Google's search monopoly, rendering it a null benefit to your rankings as everyone else transitions to it.
    - slig 9y ago
      > The search benefit isn't even a long-term one: Either AMP will go away for some reason at some point, or, if the status quo is maintained, everyone will be forced to use AMP by Google's search monopoly, rendering it a null benefit to your rankings as everyone else transitions to it. Maybe in the long term, but meanwhile they get the benefits for being early adopters. If AMP fails, they will simply roll back.
    - trg2 9y ago
      I think Airbnb should throw away everything they've done to date and hire all the Hacker News commenters to run their strategy instead. > it's very unlikely that Airbnb wants to admit they're probably being paid for it or getting some other form of special consideration for writing this. It doesn't look like anyone from Airbnb wrote this. But you're right, that's a good strategy - instead of the accommodation and experiences thing, they should implement AMP and get paid by Google for it. That's how business works: https://i.imgur.com/Vd6gI7X.jpg?1h https://i.imgur.com/Vd6gI7X.jpg?1h Congratulations Brian and Gil on implementing this!
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - Spivak 9y ago
    Unless you're the 1% of websites you probably should implement AMP if you want fast loading (from search or news aggregators at least) because nothing is going to beat cached content loaded inline.
hammock 9y ago
Unless it's AMP for email, which is more like a set of rich features for Gmail recipients
callahad 9y ago
In a large enough organization, improving site performance is hard, as you have to win political battles against your marketing / bizdev teams, denying them the analytics packages they want in the name of performance. "We could do that, but then we'd lose the special AMP placement on Google SERPs" is a much more compelling argument, and preferable to starting a proxy war between the CMO and the CTO. Google has done a hell of a job flexing their Search muscles to encourage the behavior they want, here. All the while somehow open-washing the project so that SEO-types make the ridiculous statements you quoted, implying that AMP isn't a Google owned-and-run project. On an engineering level, I respect AMP. From an anti-competitive / social engineering perspective, it's absolutely terrifying.
- underwater 9y ago
  AMP has a whole suite of technical limitations that are unrelated to the problem being solved. For example they limit pages to 50k (pre-gzip) of unlined CSS rather than allowing stylesheets to be linked. This is not how sites are generally built, and at least for me, meant rebuilding large parts of my build process. Google engineers seem to have a hard time differentiating between a platform and a framework. PWAs and suffer from the exact same problem. They’re great if you build a greenfield product to their exact specs, but difficult to use otherwise.
  - fooker 9y ago
    >'how sites are built' I take a look at the average mobile web page and thank Google that AMP brings sone restrictions.
    - underwater 9y ago
      Then why pretend that it’s still just a web page? Google might as well drop the charade and push an proprietary binary format.
      - Spivak 9y ago
        Because becoming essentially Chrome only is the antithesis of their core business model of getting as many eyeballs as possible. Not particularly good for the web either. From a technical standpoint it wouldn't surprise me if people start proposing binary formats that beat text/plain + gzip in size and speed.
tyingq 9y ago
The "SEO" benefit comes at a big price. You give up the reddest part of your page's heatmap to a 3rd party with often conflicting objectives. There's many downsides, but, for example...Google carousel results inject JavaScript that allows the end customer to left or right swipe right to a competitor...if you choose the AMP path. I'm not clear on why Google doesn't give control of the top banner to publishers.
baddox 9y ago
Doesn’t implementing AMP give you both the SEO benefit and the performance benefit?

by untog 9y ago

toomuchtodo 9y ago

> The reason to use AMP is SEO. If you want literally any benefit other than SEO, just improve the performance on your own mobile site. It's a growth hack to get better organic search traffic, with user experience performance improvements a secondary concern.

untog 9y ago
My point is that you wouldn't know it from the article. It makes it sound like you should implement AMP for user experience and fast loading, despite then going on to detail the ways in which it compromises user experience. When a big company like Airbnb jumps on a technology bandwagon people notice, and write-ups like this influence the choices other organisations make. They could at least just be upfront about the reasons why they're doing it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  The reason Airbnb is not likely to be upfront about why they're doing it, is it's very unlikely that Airbnb wants to admit they're probably being paid for it or getting some other form of special consideration for writing this. The search benefit isn't even a long-term one: Either AMP will go away for some reason at some point, or, if the status quo is maintained, everyone will be forced to use AMP by Google's search monopoly, rendering it a null benefit to your rankings as everyone else transitions to it.
  - slig 9y ago
    > The search benefit isn't even a long-term one: Either AMP will go away for some reason at some point, or, if the status quo is maintained, everyone will be forced to use AMP by Google's search monopoly, rendering it a null benefit to your rankings as everyone else transitions to it. Maybe in the long term, but meanwhile they get the benefits for being early adopters. If AMP fails, they will simply roll back.
  - trg2 9y ago
    I think Airbnb should throw away everything they've done to date and hire all the Hacker News commenters to run their strategy instead. > it's very unlikely that Airbnb wants to admit they're probably being paid for it or getting some other form of special consideration for writing this. It doesn't look like anyone from Airbnb wrote this. But you're right, that's a good strategy - instead of the accommodation and experiences thing, they should implement AMP and get paid by Google for it. That's how business works: https://i.imgur.com/Vd6gI7X.jpg?1h https://i.imgur.com/Vd6gI7X.jpg?1h Congratulations Brian and Gil on implementing this!
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- Spivak 9y ago
  Unless you're the 1% of websites you probably should implement AMP if you want fast loading (from search or news aggregators at least) because nothing is going to beat cached content loaded inline.

hammock 9y ago

Unless it's AMP for email, which is more like a set of rich features for Gmail recipients

callahad 9y ago

In a large enough organization, improving site performance is hard, as you have to win political battles against your marketing / bizdev teams, denying them the analytics packages they want in the name of performance. "We could do that, but then we'd lose the special AMP placement on Google SERPs" is a much more compelling argument, and preferable to starting a proxy war between the CMO and the CTO. Google has done a hell of a job flexing their Search muscles to encourage the behavior they want, here. All the while somehow open-washing the project so that SEO-types make the ridiculous statements you quoted, implying that AMP isn't a Google owned-and-run project. On an engineering level, I respect AMP. From an anti-competitive / social engineering perspective, it's absolutely terrifying.

underwater 9y ago
AMP has a whole suite of technical limitations that are unrelated to the problem being solved. For example they limit pages to 50k (pre-gzip) of unlined CSS rather than allowing stylesheets to be linked. This is not how sites are generally built, and at least for me, meant rebuilding large parts of my build process. Google engineers seem to have a hard time differentiating between a platform and a framework. PWAs and suffer from the exact same problem. They’re great if you build a greenfield product to their exact specs, but difficult to use otherwise.
- fooker 9y ago
  >'how sites are built' I take a look at the average mobile web page and thank Google that AMP brings sone restrictions.
  - underwater 9y ago
    Then why pretend that it’s still just a web page? Google might as well drop the charade and push an proprietary binary format.
    - Spivak 9y ago
      Because becoming essentially Chrome only is the antithesis of their core business model of getting as many eyeballs as possible. Not particularly good for the web either. From a technical standpoint it wouldn't surprise me if people start proposing binary formats that beat text/plain + gzip in size and speed.

tyingq 9y ago

The "SEO" benefit comes at a big price. You give up the reddest part of your page's heatmap to a 3rd party with often conflicting objectives. There's many downsides, but, for example...Google carousel results inject JavaScript that allows the end customer to left or right swipe right to a competitor...if you choose the AMP path. I'm not clear on why Google doesn't give control of the top banner to publishers.

baddox 9y ago

Doesn’t implementing AMP give you both the SEO benefit and the performance benefit?