They do. They reward sites that load fast. They also offer AMP as another way to speed sites up, which in turn makes them rise in rankings. But Google offers a large suite of tools to help web developers speed up their websites.

I hear this a lot, but whenever I search for something common like lyrics or weather, I get only large bloated webpages, while the lightweight and simple ones are nowhere to be found. Unless Google opens up their reasoning for ranking, I genuinely don't believe they add enough weight to load-times.

Huh, what? What site do you get? I always get azlyrics which is a fairly simple and clean site. EVery other one I tried seems more bloated.

Obviously, there's many other factors at play. SEO is a complicated world, especially in such a crowded place as song lyrics. Though I noticed Google actually has an inline box for lyrics now which avoids the issue entirely.

azlyrics is far from what I would consider simple or clean. It took over 30s to load for me and had way too much junk on the page.

Yes, there are many factors, and I clearly don't know all of them. I definitely see the problem that Google's inline (or amp) is trying to solve, but I think encouraging the right sites to grow to the top is a much better solution.

If only it were as simple as that. AMP websites get a place in the search carousel of Google. So even if your website loads faster than an AMP page, it would not be placed in the carousel - and that's Google forcing companies to adopt AMP even if they already have a fast website.

They penalize slow sites, its very different.

If all websites fall into one of two categories: fast or slow, and you penalize one, it's the same as helping the other and vice versa.

The world isn't that simple. Search engines know how fast their fetches are all of the time, but they only know how fast a javascript-heavy site is when the search engine crawls with javascript on -- which is rarely.

And by construction, AMP pages are easy to analyze without having to execute anything.

You perhaps underestimate the complexity and fidelity of the Google crawl, indexing, and ranking pipeline. Many intelligent people have spent many years trying to solve the sorts of problems you describe.

(disclaimer: I work at Google, and used to work on Search)

I totally get that Google has done a lot of work on these issues. It is still the case that no website that wants good ranks should depend on Google executing their javascript. Implementing AMP, on the other hand, means that you know you're going to get a good mobile speed score.

In no way was I dissing Google's crawl or crawl team. I'm just handing out conservative advice for website owners.

(disclaimer: blekko Founder/CTO. Nice to meet you.)

Nice to meet you too :)

I don't immediately see the vast difference between ranking fast sights higher and ranking slow sites lower. Clue me in please.

AMP pages can be tested and proven to load fast. There's no way to guarantee that a non-AMP page will be fast for a user. The way AMP is designed allows Google to inspect the source and determine whether the page meets the requirements or not. Caching the page guarantees that the content Google tests is the content the user gets.

Imagine if Google rewarded plain old websites the same way they reward AMP sites. You'd have sites gaming the system by hiding ads and disabling web fonts just to get ranked higher, then taking a crap on "real" users visiting the site.

Bing also includes AMP in their search results: http://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-t...

AMP is a standard for creating fast / jank-free web sites, which all search engines can implement freely. Google is spearheading the effort because nobody else did, but they're not monopolizing it. Everyone is free to contribute.

Afaik, AMP is solely driven and developed by Google engineers, both standard and implementation.

Everyone is free to follow, but they don't accept contributions. That is monopolising.

It is not true that AMP does not accept contributions. What is your data to back that up?

Here is actual data: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/graphs/contributors AMP currently has 275 contributors (people whose code was merged) on its open source project. Lets aim high and say 50 of them work for Google (probably a bit less), that leaves about 225 other contributors.