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Comment by rsoto | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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