A feast of audience engagement reading
Now just watch me justify that headline in the first par…
If you've ever been a freelancer, you will be familiar with the famine/feast cycle of the work-style. (If you've been or are a freelancer and you've only ever experienced the feast side of that equation, I hate you, but only because I'm jealous.) Happily, I'm passing through the feast side right now, and I'm pretty much well booked up until the summer. And last week, in particular, I barely had time to look up from my desk.
However, that means a few things around the edges have been neglected — including my personal reading and writing. Having hit a few deadlines, I've actually had time to start going through my rather terrifying backlog of open tabs, and here are a few choice cuts that I've encountered so far that might be useful for you. They're broken down into topics for easy browsing
SEO — death of AMP, Google News Showcase goes desktop
A few people have asked me to write about the Core Web Vitals update that Google's implementing — I will get to that soon. However, in the meantime, here's one core (ho, ho) fact that you need to know: AMP ceases to be a requirement for appearing in the news carousel.
The upside of this is that it might well now be better focusing developer time on making your mobile pages better, rather than building out AMP and the separate set of pages that requires.
Marko Saric
This is an interesting change. I still remain sceptical about how much traffic Google News (as opposed to the News element that gets extruded into the carousel) actually drives — but if you're seeing significant traffic from it, this is worth paying attention to:
Carolyn Lyden
Instagram — the algorithm (somewhat) explained
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