Google is rolling out a significant change as part of their page encounter ranking algorithm in June 2021. From the release of the Core Internet Vitals and the page encounter algorithm, there isn’t no longer any preferential treatment for Accelerated Mobile Pages in Google’s search results page, Top News Carousel, and Google News. Google will even remove the AMP badge icon from the search results. You are now able to safely ignore Google AMP when constructing a more varied and more exciting internet without any artificial restrictions. Google AMP is no longer needed to rank. Your website may be quicker than AMP without utilizing AMP.
Auto playing advertisements and videos, paywalls, popups, invasive advertising, and thus many more unnecessary components. Many websites are horribly slow, user-hostile, and bloated places full of distractions. It is a fantastic move to attempt to create a better internet by incentivizing website owners to develop faster sites. Google’s stated intent was to rank the sites which load faster, but they ended up ranking the sites which use AMP instead. And the biggest advertising company in the world dictating how websites can be built isn’t a means to a far healthy and more receptive internet. We do not need a Google shaped web that is delivered by Google.
From the page experience algorithm shift, Google is providing ranking incentives to sites that are fast instead. This is something that must have been done from the start without even getting into the entire AMP mess. Google has been compelling sites to use AMP for many years and carries on to recommend it as most of the AMP pages achieve great page experiences. However, for websites that are optimized for speed, their AMP pages tend to be slower than the typical pages.
Why did Google make this change now?
Google AMP was never popular. It had been controversial from the day it was released and got a large pushback and lots of hate, but Google stuck to the weapons for ages. AMP places Google in control of the internet and of what an internet site can be. Google places itself between the visitor and the website. It took control and independence away from websites that felt compelled to use Google AMP. Now all the websites have a selection. If you would like higher rankings and more traffic from search engines, you have to optimize your website for a better, more performant, and faster user experience.
And you now have a choice of technology you would like to use to get there. AMP is no longer Google necessity to create a fast loading site. You are able to develop a lightweight site with a great page encounter and top Core Internet Vitals scores even without utilizing the limited and Google-controlled method of constructing a website. If Google AMP is the best method for you to build a better and faster website, you may use it, but in many cases simply building without AMP will give you the upper hand.
Here’s what Google had to say:
The Top Stories carousel feature on Google Search will be updated to include all news content. This means that using the AMP format is no longer required and that any page, irrespective of its Core Web Vitals score or page experience status, will be eligible to appear in the Top Stories carousel.
We’re also bringing similar updates to the Google News app, a key destination for users around the world to get a comprehensive view of the important news of the day. As part of the page experience update, we’re expanding the usage of non-AMP content to power the core experience on news.google.com and in the Google News app.
Additionally, we will no longer show the AMP badge icon to indicate AMP content
This is an excellent step towards a more independent, open, and healthier web. So many websites, particularly news publishers, felt like hostages and were forced to use AMP with the only motivation being the promise of more search traffic.
From this update, you can outrank AMP pages and get more search traffic by creating a faster website with a better user experience.