Beginning in May, AMP Pages Will No Longer Be Artificially Prioritized in Google Searches ⇥ lafoo.com
Barry Schwartz, writing for Search Engine Land in November:
The Google Page Experience update is set to launch next May, Google confirmed Tuesday. That’s roughly a year after the company first announced the update and gives us another six months to prepare for it.
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As we outlined in May, page experience is made up of several existing Google search ranking factors, including the Mobile-friendly update, Page Speed Update, the HTTPS ranking boost, the intrusive interstitials penalty, safe browsing penalty, while refining metrics around speed and usability. These refinements are under what Google calls Core Web Vitals.
Google provided a distinct advantage to sites using AMP – priority placement on the world’s largest traffic source – Google search. I’ve had the pleasure of working with more than twenty thousand publishers in the five years since AMP’s launch, and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a single reason that a publisher uses AMP other than to obtain this priority placement. Let me package that up for you — Google, the most dominant search engine globally — used that dominant market position to encourage publishers to adopt technology so that Google could store and serve publisher’s content on Google’s domain. How is that legal? Well, I’m not a lawyer, but it possibly isn’t.
The good news is that, in May, this is all about to change. Part of the Google update is that all pages with high Page Experience scores are eligible to be in the featured top news carousel. This effectively means that publishers will no longer be forced to use AMP and can instead provide fast, rich experiences on their own domains.
Let us hope this marks the rapid decline of a proprietary format designed to replicate the open standards of the web in a way that Google can more readily control and track. May all future attempts at this nonsense fail long before they are legitimized.