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Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

I had been told (and I have 0 special knowledge here, this is just what a consultant in this space explained to me a few years ago) that AMP boosted your placement specifically because latency was a scored and important factor.

As such, all you needed to do to get similar rankings was use any sort of CDN hosting for your page and you would get similar results to using AMP.

Also, it sorta seems to me like the author is complaining, "I can't just do a minimum effort AMP page for the search juice, I actually have to make a functional AMP offering or not use AMP at all." Strictly as a consumer, I feel like maybe Google is doing me a favor while telling off a publisher.

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CDN helps with the page load/latency variable of Google' PageRank but won't equal AMP.

To get AMP-like speed you'd need: CDN, no render-blocking javascript, minimized image files, "lazy-loaded" assets & inlined CSS for "Above the Fold" content. On the server side you want to cache content with something like Varnish & send it over an "Edge" network like Akamai or Fastly. Ideally everything is served over HTTP2 or SPDY.

Doing all that replicates what AMP does.

That's sort of my point: publishers seem mad at the temerity that they can't festoon their web pages with tons of stuff and then not also be put in a category that is meant to be fast.

There are other parts of AMP I am less okay with, but tbh I trust the publishers even less than I trust Google with respect to sketchy tracking bugs and data collection and useless javascript ux.

Not true. Google favors AMP content in “articles for you” on chrome mobile, as well as featured story carousels on search and inside Google discover. All of these areas can be a massive firehose of traffic.

If you make a living from a content site, you have to play ball and create AMP versions of all your pages.

OR, you can choose to lose to your competitors. Let’s stop pretending like that’s really a choice, or that any sizable share of users will ever switch to DuckDuckGo.

This is where we need government to step in and regulate Google’s de facto monopoly on search.

Has someone demonstrated that if you make a static page with similar characteristics to AMP on a different CDN, that this doesn't get similar placement?

I'd be more inclined to side with publishers here if AMP was the only way to get this. But as an awful lot of content sites are run by folks very mad that they can't run their own invasive tracking and analytics, my sympathy is limited.

Just click on any link inside of chrome's "articles for you" on your phone and look at the url.

I haven't seen a single non-AMP article there, and I've been checking for a year.

The first part of your post is incorrect, AMP is instant because it is prerendered, which just using a CDN can't achieve.

The second part is correct. I hate Reddit AMP results, and I'm happy that Google is telling them to fix it. I'll be even happier when they and other search engines demote Reddit AMP pages that do not match the canonical pages.

> I hate Reddit AMP results, and I'm happy that Google is telling them to fix it.

Is there some kind of real news about Reddit AMP changing, specifically? I don't see that in the link.

It says Google is validating that AMP pages match the content of the canonical pages and warning webmasters when they don't. I desuced that Reddit would get these emails because their AMP pages are the biggest offender that I regularly see.

Can you talk more about the prerendering? I thought that was a thing Google does to many pages, not just AMP, when possible.

It is unsafe to deanonymize a user to a website that the user did not even click on. That's why the page is served from the link aggregator's AMP cache.

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