Google, from May 2021, speed is measured in this way

For some time now, the dogma that Google has imposed on the Web has been that of speed: with the arrival of Chrome first and then with a series of rules on the search engine, Google has tried to push ever more urgently so that sites can be fast, responsive, such as to make the online experience as effective and pleasant as possible. This pressure has certainly been virtuous in many ways, but it may have pushed Google beyond a threshold that some consider dangerous. Between winks and unspoken, Google is now taking a step sideways, if not in principle, at least in the way it grounded its prescriptions.

More speed, less AMP

Specifically, Google reaffirms that in the future speed will be an increasingly important component of its ranking and that the related signals will have an ever greater weight: "These signals measure the way in which users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. and contribute to our ongoing commitment to provide people with more useful and fun experiences on the Web. " The news will be effective from May 2021, when they will become an integral part of the Google analysis on indexed sites.

At the same time, however, Google takes a small step back on the AMP front: while reaffirming their priority, Google does not strengthen its exclusive position and, on the contrary, promotes speed as an essential cornerstone while equalizing AMP pages and non-AMP ones in this kind of discussion. "Any page that complies with Google News content policies," explains Google, "will be eligible and we will prioritize pages with an excellent experience, regardless of whether they are implemented using AMP or any other web technology, when we rank the results ". The search engine will also use a specific badge to enhance the goodness of the experience on the sites with the highest performances, thus trying to stimulate their adherence to the Mountain View diktats in a less trenchant and more coercive way.

We believe that providing information on the quality of the experience related to a web page can be useful for choosing the search result that users want to visit. In the results, the preview of the snippet or image provides users with a thematic context to understand what information can be provided by a page. Visual indicators in the results represent another way to do the same and we are working on an indicator that identifies the pages that have met all the criteria of the page experience. We plan to carry out the test as soon as possible and, if successful, it will launch in May 2021. We will provide further details on its progress in the coming months.

With this move, Google still achieves its goal of push for an increasingly optimized development of the pages, but it does so without putting the necessary precondition of the use of AMPs (which, as is known, prefigure the loading of pages on Mountain View servers, generating a sort of parallel Web that in the antitrust area might not even like someone). From May, in short, AMP or non-AMP will count for little: what matters will be performance, and they will count more and more.

Source: Google Search Central