“First and foremost, we were focused on listening to Google’s advice to publishers to focus on creating a better experience for readers using core web vitals, with ranking being the reward for those that made the necessary investments.”įuture isn’t an outlier here. “It was the investment in core web vitals that enabled us to move away from AMP,” said Forrest. So even if they wanted to, they’ve got a lot of work to do before they can.”įor Future, this happened almost by accident thanks to another project: to focus on core web vitals - specific factors that Google considers important in a webpage’s overall user experience and ultimately search ranking - for its web pages, which included the mobile versions of them. “If you look at some of the public domain tools for assessing the speed of sites then you’ll see that some of our peers are nowhere near fast enough to be able to switch off AMP. and also launched its audience development working group. “Lots of publishers are looking at this, but very few are taking the brave step,” said Forrest, who chairs the organizing committee at trade body the Association of Online Publishers in the U.K. No wonder there are many publishers that want to leave AMP but don’t feel they can - at least not in Europe. There’s a level of technical proficiency needed to get web pages loading as fast as or faster than AMP that has stumped many publishers. “It means publishers can have a presence in that carousel if their mobile site was as performant as AMP,” said Forrest. From then on more non-AMP stories started to rank. Simply put, AMP was an offer Future couldn’t refuse - at least until last autumn when Google decided AMP was no longer a prerequisite for visibility in its Top Stories carousel. “The upside of AMP was that was needed to get into the Top Stories box, which was important for our brands because while our consumer electronics coverage might cover the launch of a new iphone, which is a big news event in this area, but it’s not a story on whether Russia is going to invade Ukraine,” said Forrest. Few publishers could willingly wave bye bye to that amount of reach, especially those that can’t always bank on topical news to drive interest. Without AMP articles, publishers would struggle to have content shown in Google’s mobile Top Stories carousel, which accounted for the vast majority of organic search traffic for publishers. To say publishers have found the situation frustrating would be an understatement. It left publishers with limited media on AMP pages they could sell to advertisers. To speed up the web, Google had to strip down pages, which in turn throttled the kinds of ad units publishers could run. Like many publishers they’d been aware of AMP’s shortcomings almost as soon as it arrived in 2016: mainly, making money from those articles. Not that any of this is necessarily a surprise to execs at Future.
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