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Comment by slackoverflower | Hacker News Reader

You seem to be the missing the whole point of AMP's popularity. The glorious sliding carousel on Google.com that gives any news website a massive SEO boost. AMP is the biggest thing to hit the SEO industry in a while. I imagine most of these media companies could not give a shit about website optimization, its all about website monetization.

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Which is short sighted on their part. As an AMP early adopter they get a boost. But, as the industry moves to AMP their SEO boost is lost. So, their boost is short lived, but Google's edge influence expands and persists over the long term.

For the most part, digital publishing's remaining lifespan isn't that long. Not as short-sighted in their remaining life...

care to elaborate?

Isn't that the story of all SEO? It's an ongoing arms race, few things make you win forever.

What's worse is once you've lost those short term gains, you can't actually back out since it'll actually cost you search result placements. AMP's a really shady move by Google.

No, I get that. But every time one of those publications discusses that they talk about how much faster it is.

I don't like being lied to.

They're not doing it because it's faster, they're doing it because they want the rank boost.

So I think I should just say that. "We did it to get higher rankings because Google prioritizes it." Don't lie and say it was to get things to be faster, you could've done that on your own.

Not willing to say that? Then don't talk about speed. Because you had control over that.

Right, and this form of forced "SEO" compliance by Google's hand is utterly fucked up.

There is little to no financial incentive for companies to swim against the current, and large financial incentive to come aboard and join the ranks of other AMP-supported sites.

The cracks in the system are beginning to show.

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