Can we stand up to Google as developers?
Let me start this by saying I despise SEO. I hate the very idea of the ability to come up with strategies to become the more popular site based on literally anything other than good content. Let me also say that I understand it’s necessary, but in my opinion it is a necessary evil.
But this article isn’t exactly about SEO. It is about Google imposing their will on developers and how they build their sites. It’s about Google choosing what is right for our users.
I got involved in a discussion today about Critical CSS and the whole above the fold content delivery today. Something that if you don’t do it Google will penalize your search rankings. This is getting into the realm of stupid, and interfering, and quite honestly Big Brother behaviour.
My business website has a payload of 768kb. It makes 15 requests and has an average load time of under 1.2 seconds. It scores 100% on PageSpeed and 95% on YSlow.
It scores 65% for mobile and 78% for desktop on PageSpeed Insights. Why? Because my CSS and fonts are render blocking, meaning they have to load before the site content. I do this because I don’t want font flash, I find that far more distracting as a user than waiting an extra few milliseconds for my fonts to load prior to render.
Let me put this in perspective. My time to first meaningful render is usually around 800 milliseconds for this site. Less than one second average for the site to render.
Google is penalizing my search rankings not because my content is bad. It is penalizing me because I am not instantly showing the user something, even if that something isn’t good content, isn’t any content other than an image in my site’s case because this is about “above the fold” view and my site image is set to take up that entire space.
A shitty site, with garbage content but built the “Google way” will benefit from that regardless of how good their content is. Now I understand this isn’t the only ranking metrics obviously, but it’s a stupid one in my opinion. And it’s proving that Google runs the web, and it’s high time we stand up and say NO.
Sadly this is probably an unwinnable battle. We’re going to be relegated to an internet where 50% of the sites have font flash, or give up the design choice of nice typography to use system fonts instead. All because Google decided that 800ms render time is too slow.
I’m not doing it, honestly I don’t really care a lot if my site ranks high on Google because I don’t generally find my clients that way, but my clients care about Google ranking, so I am going to be forced to implement this stupidity, then when they ask why their sites suffer from FOUT I’m going to have to explain “because Google runs the internet”.
Once upon a time search engines weren’t as critical as they are now. Shortly after that there were a bunch of choices and they were all sort of equal. Then Google came out on top. Yahoo still exists, Bing is still a thing, some hardcore people like Duck Duck Go, but honestly all clients care about is Google ranking, and the second that happened Google started imposing their will on how we build sites.
Competition is good, for this very reason, one company cannot decide what is right for everyone. I miss the days when the web was about content and not stupid tweaks to stay at the top of listings based on parameters that… don’t fucking matter to real world users.
/rant
