
You Don't Get AMP - quarterto
http://blog.153.io/2017/03/08/you-dont-get-amp/
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colept
Cleverly leaves out the part where Google siphons your traffic. AMP is the
trojan horse and I don't "get" those welcoming it into the gates.

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quarterto
If you use Cloudflare as your CDN, is Cloudflare "siphoning your traffic"?

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soared
Does cloudflare take users to a webpage that isn't yours with a header with a
button that doesn't lead to your site?

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quarterto
The page is still yours. You have absolute control over the branding, the
analytics, the monetisation. Just because it happens not to be served from
your domain doesn't mean it's not yours.

Let's also not forget that AMP is actively encouraging alternative caches:
Cloudflare Ampersand[1] was announced literally an hour after my post. It's a
whitelabelled AMP cache aimed at solving this exact problem.

[1]: [https://www.cloudflare.com/website-
optimization/ampersand/](https://www.cloudflare.com/website-
optimization/ampersand/)

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soared
Yes you still control most of it. My argument is that the traffic /would/ be
going to your actual site (where you aren't limited at all) but now it is
going to a google AMP page with strict limitations. Which isn't great, but the
big deal is that bar on top that doesn't link to your site. That is so bad for
your site and massively increases the bounce rate.

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quarterto
That is a sticking point for me. Alternative AMP caches (with alternative UX,
e.g. Ampersand generally keeps users on your site when they bounce) go some
way towards solving this, but they're not (yet?) first-class ecosystem
citizens:

> But these are just guidelines, and Google can’t guarantee they’re behaving
> well, so they’re not first-class citizens.

> I’d love for this to be something you could statically verify, just like AMP
> HTML, so that anybody could add a Cache to the ecosystem and get a lightning
> bolt on Google search results and Cloudflare links and Twitter Moments™, but
> I’m pretty sure this reduces to the Halting Problem.

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flukus
> Tap a Top Stories card, and bam, you’re in the article. Takes maybe 100
> milliseconds, just at the edge of perception. You can’t do that with a full
> page load: not on a 3G network, not on a mobile CPU.

Yes you can, quite comfortably. Pre rendering is just patching the bloated
web, not fixing it. If you want to make the web better focus on less
javascript, with noscript on I get AMP like speeds almost everywhere.

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quarterto
But that's the point: AMP allows far richer pages than just totally cutting
out Javascript. Like it or not, the web is an application platform.

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CaptSpify
What does amp give me that a non-js page can't?

Also, applications aren't the target for amp.

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quarterto
Can you write a carousel without JS? A live blog? Lazy loading images and ads?
A stateful e-commerce product page?

Have a look through the list of AMP components, you'll be surprised what's
possible.
[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components)

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CaptSpify
Good examples, but none of that is anything that I want. I'd much prefer
small, simple, static pages to any of that. Additionally, they will load
faster, and be easier to read. Those things are just trimming pages down to
what Google wants, not users.

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quarterto
As somebody who has implemented AMP for a major newspaper, these are in fact
things that publishers want.

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flukus
Adding shit because publishers want them is how things got so bloated in the
first place. If it weren't for that we wouldn't need AMP.

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webartisan
As someone who has developed for mobile web, it can be surprisingly hard to
push back on bloat from marketing / seo / analytics teams. I hope this becomes
a W3C standard so us developers can show them the finger the next time they
want to bring mobile web to a crawl.

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CaptSpify
Does Google not have any guidelines that say to keep pages small and fast?
Seems like they should have a list of things to keep in mind when looking at
search-rankings

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webartisan
It does, although only can only assume the effect of performance on search
rankings. It's non-tangible metric as far as revenue is concerned.

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CaptSpify
Then what would be the difference between showing them the AMP standards, and
just pointing them to those documents?

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CaptSpify
Oh, I get AMP just fine. I get that it's a power play by Google. The problem
AMP is trying to solve is very real. But instead of trying to fix the problem,
Google is using it to take an even greater chunk of the web.

No thanks

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quarterto
> Google gonna Google. They’ve been dangling carrots in front of publishers
> for twenty-one years.

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CaptSpify
I don't buy it. If that's true, how come all of the top results I get are
slow, heavy bloated sites, yet small, simple, fast sites are ~10 pages deep?

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quarterto
Sure, speed should be a ranking factor, but I'd much rather have a slow site
that's relevant than a fast one that isn't.

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CaptSpify
How about a relevant page that is fast. We can have the best of both worlds.

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quarterto
Wouldn't that be nice. But Google don't control how relevant or fast something
is, they can only decide how to rank them.

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CaptSpify
... thats my point.

This is a problem that Google created. If they would prioritize small, simple,
fast sites, and rank them higher, people would make more sites like that.
Google is the one pushing slow, bloated sites to the top of the list. Now they
are coming in to "fix" the problem that they made.

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RichardHeart
If you let GOOGLE control the browser, OS, search engine, keyboard, maps, and
user created video content, what could possibly go wrong?

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owebmaster
OP: You don't get HTML

