Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsoto | Hacker News Reader

Even outside the carousel; three weeks ago we implemented AMP with our content marketing strategy and we have received 34% more visits.

I don't think people our target is more inclined into clicking on AMP results as they're non-technical, I'm guessing we're higher in the results.

View on HN

I don't think people our target is more inclined into clicking on AMP results as they're non-technical

The whole point of AMP is to target those users. Hence the little lightning bolt. Even non-technical users can notice "hey this had a lightning bolt and it was fast"

I do user research for a living, and even technical users appear to be blind to this kind of features. Maybe they're delighted by how fast the site loads after they tap the result, but can't see them making the connection between the bolt and the load speed.

But I'm digressing, what I'm seeing it's a sudden and constant traffic increase in a short time span. I'm sure it's not because the result that was on 3rd place now has a bolt icon and users are craving it; it's because my result is higher.

There are thousands of threads on search ranking forums of folks reporting traffic rising or falling significantly, right after making change X on their site, for myriad values of X, many of which make zero sense as a ranking factor.

Search ranking is complex, and sites move in search referrals by ~30% on a daily basis without making any changes. Perhaps a different major site removed pages. Perhaps a few important links were added to your site (or to a site linking to your site).

as someone who tracks rank on a daily basis and in great detail. i can tell you that rank [and traffic] changes can very clearly be attributed to specific events or actions such as new inbound organic links or new on-page changes. for web properties that have few changes which occur daily, it is very easy to see the direct impact from deploying something specific within the following week or two. there is no ambiguity as to where these things come from. our rank is very steady across thousands of keywords over time and any statistically significant changes are never a mystery.

to say that the boosted position/visibility of AMP can somehow get lost in the "noise" of rank fluctuations from other factors is demonstrably false. i dunno what kool-aid you guys are selling over there, but i'm certainly not buying it.

the mission of AMP is fully Google-centric, not user centric. it is possible and easy to build pages faster than AMP without any of AMP's additional artificial limitations. AMP's carrot is that you get much greater visibility and faster loading as a result of pages being hosted on google's servers and loading via a pre-established TLS/TCP session.

real-world AMP pages are not what they're billed to be:

https://imgur.com/a/OPVdN

https://imgur.com/a/mt6s6

If your AMP site is actually better (faster, cleaner, better adapted to mobile, etc ...) then it is possible that these 34% more visits really are deserved.

> If your AMP site is actually better (faster, cleaner, better adapted to mobile, etc ...)

Well yes, it is faster because of the strict guidelines you must follow; it's cleaner because we are not including the menu stuff and things we need for desktop, and it's better adapted for mobile since it's the only platform in which Google puts AMP results.

I'm very happy with the surge of visits, but my point was that if Google says AMP won't give you a better position on search results, what I'm seeing is the opposite.

Had you updated your site to be faster, cleaner, and better adapted to mobile without any of the AMP-specific bits, you may have seen a similar or the same jump in search results

How do you know it was the page loading and not the carousel that caused the increase?

How do you know it wasn't? :)

Yes, it might. But the truth is that in 3 weeks the traffic has increased and the only thing that changed was AMP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com