Thread · 6 tweets · 10 Nov 2020

Google announced that they will be changing Search (in May) such that AMP will no longer be a requirement for results to appear in Top Stories. Depending on how that’s done, it could be a welcome step forward, or it could make no difference whatsoever. 🧵 webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/11/timing…

A path out of AMP is important because it’s nothing but problems: • Severely decreased revenue for publishers (in both ads and subscriptions). • Decreased user experience (which we can see from the fact that it converts to subs far less). • A lot of extra work to support.

• Publishers are forced to do AMP. • The tech is brittle and hacky, and limits innovation. Could "Core Web Vitals” be a way off? Maybe, but it depends on details that Google is remaining unclear about.

One option is that CWV is a *threshold* for appearance in Top Stories (ie. what is fast enough gets in), and beyond that ranking is just based on the other signals. That would work and we could all thank Google for fixing the problem it created five years ago.

The other is that CWV remains a *ranking* factor even in TS. Ranking is very competitive. There’s no beating the 0ms loading time of preloaded content hosted with Google (through AMP Bundles). Under that case this change makes no difference since we all have to keep doing AMP.

I hope it’s the former (I would like to spend less of my time on Google-created problems!) but fear it’s the latter. (If it is the latter, the anticompetitive issues around AMP don’t change, so that might be a factor.) Either way it would be great to clarify in the post!