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Discussion on: An Open Letter to Web Developers from an Enterprise SEO

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africasiaeuro profile image
Heinz Rainer • Edited

Cool. Here's another one. All my sites been switched to Google amp, includes structured data. There are millions of sites out there which don't confrom to Google s speed requirements. Amp solves this issue. Page loads under 2 sec. without cdn.

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teepleb profile image
Blake Teeple

Google has publically stated that there are no true "speed" requirements but you should optimize for fastest possible.

They even stated their current update for speed only targets the slowest of sites and speed as a ranking factor is actually very small. The idea behind speed is for the user experience. It helps you rank indirectly more than directly.

In all honesty, AMP is fairly bad and Google doesnt even like it hence "Web Light" coming out where Google publically stated they modify your pages for mobile users as they choose.

AMP also is easy for you to lose users as they can swipe left/right and be gone. There is no true conversion factor there.

I would suggest leaving AMP to content publications that don't rely on conversions, if anything.

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africasiaeuro profile image
Heinz Rainer

Thanks for your comments. We got lots of advice from a number of sources prior to yours stating the opposite. After reading comments on indexing mobile sites ( and desktop sites ) on their ( Google's) WM blog, I feel our efforts wasted. It was stated clearly that mobile friendly desktop sites will be indexed first. Will skip AMP now.

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teepleb profile image
Blake Teeple

Yup, we highly considered it as it was promoted so heavily by Google.

We found 0 actual impact from it and our bounce rate and metrics got so much worse with crap data.

We removed and nothing even happened while using it or when it was removed - ranks stayed the same.

Google announcing Web Light pretty much sealed the deal on AMP. They publicly said they make mobile optimized pages of your site as they see fit whether its AMP or not.

Your best bet is to make a mobile responsive website and not spend time working through stuff like AMP.

At the end of the day Google will do as Google wants so make sure you're catering to your customer or users as much as possible and you'll do fine.