Just look at this example: http://i.imgur.com/84FvZmA.png Notice how the news carousel is completely unrelated, and the pages do not otherwise show up in the search.
Also notice the awesome bug in Google where "Nazi flag" returns "Flag of Germany".
Oh, certainly for English results showing news results for that query is very, very relevant given what is going on in the US with people waving actual nazi flags. You can see that if you e.g. search for a flag that isn't in the news (like danish flag) there is no news result.
You’d think so. But many blogs and ecommerce sites have started dressing their content up so that it ends up in that carousel, even if it’s not actually relevant.
Google always ends up putting news from a sailing event from last year in that carousel when I search stuff about my city. Especially awesome in Google News & Weather, where 90% of the news are from last year.
Google seems to just displays the top X search results that happen to be AMP, no matter how old they actually are.
That said, an antitrust complaint was filed with the EU anyway, so we can all just hope your employer is forced to end AMP sooner rather than later, and we can all replace it with a solution that doesn’t rely on any single group’s implementation.
Yeah, but load speed is, and imagine how skewed and unfair it is for Google to load an AMP page from its own cache and compare that to loading a page from someone else's (possibly objectively faster) site. And Google doesn't consider AMP pages cached from sources other than Google to be real AMP pages.
The carousel ranks in position one if it is determined to be the best result. It can rank way below. https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook is a good way to see that.
Original article was about e-commerce. The Top Stories carousel is not relevant to e-commerce since it only contains news articles.
You're taking the guidelines for the Google AMP Cache. Do you have any sources showing that an AMP page hosted by CloudFlare is demoted compared to on hosted on Google?
And why is that?
> More traffic without conversions generally does not help an e-commerce site.
You should not be using AMP for e-commerce, at least not for anything but a static product page.
Again, if you try to drive a nail with a hammer and it doesn't work, the fault isn't on the hammer, it's on you.