I've heard so much negative feedback about AMP that I'm not sure I have the full story. What link(s) would you recommend someone review if they wanted to build their own informed decision on the merits of this technology?
Today is the first time I've heard of AMP, so I don't have a dog in this hunt. I visited each of your links and followed some links on those pages, and I still have no idea what AMP is. All I see is a promise that pages will load faster. It also seems that if my boss drinks the koolaid and says "We need AMP!" it's going to cost me money in developer time, because the technology is inscrutable to my unskilled content providers. What benefits does it provide that disciplined web design doesn't? Is Google going to penalize my sites if we don't use it? We don't include advertising in our pages, so should we care about AMP?
AMP is mostly a series of guidelines. https://www.ampproject.org/learn/about-how/ If your site follows the guidelines, it will be fast. If you also voluntarily add a bit of JS to your page, Google (and other sites, but mostly Google) will cache your article and deliver it from their own CDN instead of loading it from your site. They won't interfere with your ads if you have them set up right. The trouble is that the URL is now a Google URL and Google puts links to more Google pages at the top of the interface instead of other links to your articles.
So, instead of actually using AMP, you could just follow the AMP guidelines and get most of the speed benefits with almost no downsides. But Google started prioritizing AMP pages in search results, so now there's a downside either way.
You can beat AMP's performance with hand-tuned optimizations. Its goal is to uplift performance across a significant percentage of web content (instead of just that developed by the few experts).
Is Google going to penalize my sites if we don't use it? No, AMP is not a ranking factor.
We don't include advertising in our pages, so should we care about AMP?
Advertising is to AMP like Advertising is to the Web. E-commerce is a big use case where advertising is uncommon.
I understand that AMP is not a ranking factor (except for its inherent speed, perhaps). However, is there not a carousal at the top of SERPs for pages in your AMP Cache?
So while not an organic ranking factor, it would still affect SEO. Is that a fair comment? Or am I missing another perspective?
Not only that but site speed is a ranking factor. This answer definitely skirts around the reality that both we and he know since it has come up many times in the past.
As far as I see it, Google sees this as valuable to their interests, and have made clear what the talking points are and what should and should not be responded to. That's the only reason I can think of for this counter argument to be continually ignored by him.
When will I be able to get into the AMP carousel without having to import the AMP script from Google’s servers?
I’d prefer hosting all JS locally. (Or at least within of EU jurisdiction, as Privacy Shield is likely going to fall in the courts, too, as Safe Harbor did before, and I don't want to end up liable for that (and I don't want to sell out my users to some foreign tracking company))
I'm in the same boat. To me as a user, AMP has worked well. Loads content quickly, with from what I've experienced, very little drawbacks.
So I'm not sure whether AMP is just something controversial as a lot of things from Google tend to be it seems, or if there is some real technical merit as to why it's so bad apparently.
