"Through both internal studies and industry research, users show they prefer sites with a great page experience." You don't say!!!
Good they made internal and industry researches about this since I really thought users preferred poor experience...
I’d like some personal ranking features, or a browser extension that changes the SERP. If a page is capable of asking me to enable notifications, I want it deleted from the results. If a page has a giant popover when it loses focus, I want it demoted. Negative signals for infinite clickbait at the bottoms of articles. Let’s be opinionated about the “better web”.
These new metrics have a serious flaw. The iframe loophole is so bad, we even did a write-up on it: <a href="https://buzz.swarmify.com/how-to-get-a-100-score-on-lighthouse-pagespeed-in-one-easy-step/" rel="nofollow">https://buzz.swarmify.com/how-to-get-a-100-score-on-lighthou...</a>. See the article for the gory details, but the gist of it is, you can wrap the entire site in an iframe and always get a perfect score
I <i>think</i> I welcome these changes, but I'm worried about some of the wording that Google uses.<p><i>The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction.</i><p>I guess I have a problem with the fact that Google sees the web as primarily a business platform where users simply transact. I do use the web this way, but I don't <i>mostly</i> use the web this way.
> While all of the components of page experience are important, we will prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.<p>> ...<p>> When we roll out the page experience ranking update, we will also update the eligibility criteria for the Top Stories experience. AMP will no longer be necessary for stories to be featured in Top Stories on mobile; it will be open to any page.<p>All sounds pretty sensible.<p>For anyone working on this: Why wasn't the above done sooner? Was it challenging to come up with a fair page performance metric for instance? Was a very slow loading page not penalised before?<p>For people that weren't happy with AMP: is this moving in the right direction?
Headline:<p>> When we roll out the page experience ranking update... AMP will no longer be necessary for stories to be featured in Top Stories on mobile; it will be open to any page.
> By contrast, here are some examples of techniques that, used responsibly, would not be affected by the new signal:<p>> Interstitials that appear to be in response to a legal obligation, such as for cookie usage or for age verification.<p>Too bad they don’t penalize cookie consent popups. Google is in a unique position to motivate website owners to stop using tracking cookies and make the web a better place. As a reminder, under GDPR a consent is only needed for tracking cookies, not for functional cookies. I guess whitelisting such popups is better aligned with their ad business.
> ...remove the AMP requirement from Top Stories eligibility. Google continues to support AMP, and will continue to link to AMP pages when available.<p>Is this Google backing down on the AMP nonsense?