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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

Google could have simply made page weight a more important factor in the ranking algorithm if that was their goal.

The minute these publishers weren't getting as much search/news traffic anymore, they would have capitulated, making their sites run faster immediately, the same way they quickly capitulated to AMP.

As proven by AMP, when Google says jump, the entire interest responds by saying "How high?"

Can anybody give me a single non-nefarious reason for why AMP was necessary instead of simply enforcing page weight/loading-speed factors via the algorithm?

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AMP allows tech people at non-tech companies to push back against all the "just one tiny little thing it won't effect load speed much" requests.

Your marketing department wants another tracking script? no can do. Your exec wants a javascript "click the monkey" promo? not on the AMP site. The UX folks want parallax webGL spinning logos? Sorry AMP doesn't allow it.

It puts people who were previously not in a position where they could push back against decisions which effect load speed in a position where they can push back.

Every single one of those things could be done by google providing a simple webpage analysis tool that said "These features are lowing your score in search rank!"

Again, literally all they had to do was announce specific page speed numbers you need to hit to get featured in a special carousel (just like AMP!).

The tech team could have just as easily have said, "sorry, that would put us over our X ms page speed limit."

The fact Google spent 100X the resources of a simple algorithm update by creating AMP, tells us there were other motives behind this.

> Google could have simply made page weight a more important factor in the ranking algorithm if that was their goal.

They actually did this a few years ago: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2018/01/using-page...

And I'm sure that whosever pitched this idea to management made a big deal of how benefitial it would be for the company.

Good in theory but liable to be endlessly gamed. Using something like Amp is easy to implement even if it's not ideal.

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