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Comment by mburst | Hacker News Reader

> Instead of granting premium placement in search results only to AMP, provide the same perks to all pages that meet an objective, neutral performance criterion such as Speed Index. Publishers can then use any technical solution of their choice.

Hasn't Google gone on record saying that AMP doesn't affect search results given the same page load speed for non-AMP sites?

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Except that AMP pages are often in the band of promoted results that show above the remainder of the search results, at least in the mobile app. And are prominently icon'ed in the desktop results.

So yeah, Google's not honest about this.

From my test the AMP icon in Google's search result is gone (Chrome, Android, Incognito tab).

Disclaimer: I work for Google but not on AMP product.

Search for Trump on iOS and you'll see an AMP icon.

Is the issue the icon or the carousel being at the top? I just checked and the carousel had both AMP and non-AMP content for me.

If you can make your page load as fast as an AMP page you'll probably get ranked there as well. But that's really not easy to achieve. The reason Google can say they don't prefer AMP is because AMP is extremely fast (esp with high latency)

It's true that AMP doesn't affect organic search rank. What's misleading about that statement though is that Google displays a carousal specifically for AMP results.

They'll probably do away with the carousal eventually, but for right now an AMP page does have an advantage in search.

The carousal displays both, amp and non-amp content.

Does it? Then I may be misinformed (I very rarely use mobile).

If that's true, and amp doesn't have any preference in the carousal, then Google's comments are completely accurate.

I personally don't believe it.

Does anyone actually believe a fancy AMP powered site isn't getting nice traffic boost from Google?

You’d have to be pretty daft to take their word for it. Google hasn’t played fair in the search space in over a decade.

> Does anyone actually believe a fancy AMP powered site isn't getting nice traffic boost from Google?

If they were to get a nice traffic boost, would it be because the site actually loads faster or because it was ranked higher. I think both would increase the traffic boost.

But the question is do the speed changes made (only regarding adding AMP) effect the PageRank

Well, they may not be risking it, as the EU would happily give em another monstrous fine for that.

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