A feast of audience engagement reading

Now just watch me justify that headline in the first par…

Adam Tinworth
Adam Tinworth

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.

Google AMP is dead! AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment in Google search
From the release of the page experience algorithm, there is no longer any preferential treatment for AMP in Google’s search results, Top Stories carousel and the Google News.

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:

Google News Showcase now available on desktop, adds enhanced panels on mobile
If your publishing site is lagging on desktop, make sure to give it some attention as this update could drive more desktop traffic,

Instagram — the algorithm (somewhat) explained

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