> I don’t want web packages, nor AMP, how do I get the ranking bonus and lightning bolt icon with my website (which has Google Pagespeed of 100 and Chrome Lighthouse Pagespeed of over 95)?
First, those metrics say how well optimized your site is, not how long it takes to load. For example, a tiny site that's text and a single poorly compressed image might load in 500ms but get a low score, while a large site that loads in 5s can still get a perfect score if everything is delivered in a completely optimized way. These are metrics designed for a person who is in a position to optimize a site, but not necessarily in a position to change the way the site looks. When speed is used as a ranking signal [1][2] Google isn't using metrics about optimization level, it's using actual speed.
But ok, metrics etc aside, Google could switch to using loading speed instead of AMP to determine whether a page is eligible for the carousel at the top, and whether to show the bolt icon. But AMP means a page can be preloaded without letting publishers know that they appeared in your results page. You can't just turn on preloading without solving this somehow. AMP is kind of a hacky way to do this, and I'm really looking forward to WebPackages allowing preloading for any site in a clean standard way.
> With web packages or AMP, if I navigate from Google Search to Page A, and then from Page A to Page B, Google can see that I went to page B.
No, web packages don't allow this, what makes you think they do?
(Disclosure: I work at Google on making ads AMP so they don't get to run custom JS. Previously I worked on mod_pagespeed which automatically optimizes pages to load faster and use less bandwidth. Speaking for myself and not the company.)
First, those metrics say how well optimized your site is, not how long it takes to load. For example, a tiny site that's text and a single poorly compressed image might load in 500ms but get a low score, while a large site that loads in 5s can still get a perfect score if everything is delivered in a completely optimized way. These are metrics designed for a person who is in a position to optimize a site, but not necessarily in a position to change the way the site looks. When speed is used as a ranking signal [1][2] Google isn't using metrics about optimization level, it's using actual speed.
But ok, metrics etc aside, Google could switch to using loading speed instead of AMP to determine whether a page is eligible for the carousel at the top, and whether to show the bolt icon. But AMP means a page can be preloaded without letting publishers know that they appeared in your results page. You can't just turn on preloading without solving this somehow. AMP is kind of a hacky way to do this, and I'm really looking forward to WebPackages allowing preloading for any site in a clean standard way.
> With web packages or AMP, if I navigate from Google Search to Page A, and then from Page A to Page B, Google can see that I went to page B.
No, web packages don't allow this, what makes you think they do?
(Disclosure: I work at Google on making ads AMP so they don't get to run custom JS. Previously I worked on mod_pagespeed which automatically optimizes pages to load faster and use less bandwidth. Speaking for myself and not the company.)
[1] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-i...
[2] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-i...