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There's been a good deal of ongoing discussion about Google AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Quite a few high-profile web developers have this year weighted in with criticism and some, following a Google conference dedicated to AMP, have cautioned users about diving in with both feet.
These, in my view, don't go far enough in stating the problem and I feel this needs to be said very clearly: Google's AMP is bad – bad in a potentially web-destroying way. Google AMP is bad news for how the web is built, it's bad news for publishers of credible online content, and it's bad news for consumers of that content. Google AMP is only good for one party: Google. Google, and possibly, purveyors of fake news.
[...] What it is, is a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content and remove any lingering notions of personal credibility from the web.
If that appeals to you, here's what you need to do. First, get rid of all your HTML and render your content in a subset of HTML that Google has approved along with a few tags it invented. Because what do those pesky standards boards know? Trust Google, it knows what it's doing. And if you don't, consider yourself not part of the future of search results.
Why a subset of HTML you ask? Well, mostly because web developers suck at their jobs and have loaded the web with a ton of JavaScript no one wants. Can't fault Google for wanting to change that. That part I can support. The less JavaScript the better.
So far AMP actually sounds appealing. Except that, hilariously, to create an AMP page you have to load a, wait for it, yes a JavaScript file from Google. Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski already recreated the Google AMP demo page without the Google AMP JavaScript and, unsurprisingly, it's faster than Google's version.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday May 26 2017, @05:34AM (2 children)
Have you noticed those google answer boxes?
You have the answer to your google query right after in the result page.
Google can do that because site owners dutifully tagged and semantically contextualized their content.
Which means google mines their sites, offers users an answer and the site owner is cut out (well he could get some 25% CTR from the now slightly less interested users that have already got the short answer). And the sought after #1 spot in search results is now #2.
The upside is that any site owner can now boast to the ladies at the bar that "I work for google nao". Because he does.
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(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday May 26 2017, @10:29PM (1 child)
I have thought out one counter strategy to this. For other purposes, but it still applies. What site owners have to do is to take the words or sentences on their pages and shuffle them randomly whenever the site is indexed by google but not otherwise. This will enable keyword searching, BUT will mess up any context mining.
Install the usual bot-trap ;)
[follow this link] to ban yourself (tm) ..
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday May 27 2017, @08:13PM
you are a nice guy. I'd give googlebot perfectly fine phrases with wrong data instead >:)
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