Google Webmaster Central Blog

> If Google really wanted to improve the quality of the web they had excellent tools to achieve that: the weighing of the various elements that go into the ranking algo

Doesn't Google already do this [1]? There are unintended consequences to increasing speed's weight in search rankings. Principally, it disadvantages smaller players. (Also, the New York Times would consistently rank under Buzzfeed.)

> you are now a very willing pawn in the endgame for the domination of the world wide web

Most people get news from the walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter [2]. The minority of us sharing links to newspaper articles probably also have direct relationships with publishers. For example, I read the New York Times, Washington Post, Economist, Bloomberg and other papers directly on their sites because I subscribe to their newsletters.

> maybe you should be [concerned]

Maybe, but I don't think so. The things I read about in the newspapers AMP gives me faster access to yield better (i.e. more serious and more actionable upon) avenues for my attention. In every context where AMP is a worry journalism's decline seems more important.

[1] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

[2] http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/new-pew-data-more-americans-are-getting-news-on-facebook-and-twitter/

To me infinite scroll or not is more about what kind of content is it, statistics like generated clicks and of course UX, than the questions what's more difficult to implement.

With the abundance of ready to use opensource solutions, I'm sure most devs don't need to implement infinite scroll or a pagination mechanism themselves but they just use a component that does it out of the box and solves all those technical problems for them.

To be sure what works best for your users and type of content, I would do two versions, one with pagination and one with infinite scroll and let the numbers decide which technique makes the user click / visit content and maybe which technique does the user spend most time on the website.

I'm not totally against infinite scroll, for a social network news feed I think it's a good use case. Also all the potential problems listed have a solution and also some of the problems also exist when using a pagination. For example letting a user bookmark a page url with a pagenumber on a website with lots of new content is bad, as the content on the page number XY will have changed after few hours / days. Some good solutions if you really want to implement it on your own are listed in this google blog post: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html

> 1. The footer becomes unusable

Yep, so just put it in the fixed sidebar.

> 2. Performance degrades

Not really, if you've developed this the right way - which is render only items that are currently visible and derender the ones that are above the current scroll canvas.

> 3. Analytics is harder to implement

> 4. Bookmarking and the back button become problematic

I put those together, because they are relevant. Anyway Google suggest how to remove this [1] and even presents a demo [2]

1 : https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html
2 : http://scrollsample.appspot.com

> 5. People may suffer from choice paralysis

As other people here suggested, this depends on the content. If you work in e-commerce there is quite a habit people to scroll infinitely with a huge amount of products ( disclaimer - I'm the sole developer of `www.bagaholic.me` - bags price comparison website ).

> 6. The scrollbar becomes unusable and untrustworthy

Not a significant reason at all. Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook proved that.

> 7. It’s generally hard to use

I think stating that, without some stats is kinda "opinionated". Again based on the content a valid context with fixed sidebar, header is a must.

I just checked out the included templates. At least the first 20-30 are all ad templates, one of which is a full-screen mobile interstitial! That's the same element that just got an SEO finger wag from the Google Webmaster Central Blog[0].

_Just_ as the list of templates started getting interesting with some Youtube slider-thing integration, it came to an end. So yeah, this seems to be aimed at folks who need to build ads quickly and don't want to have to be HTML5 pros.

With that said, there's a "my templates" feature so maybe you can use it to maintain your Star Trek fan website, or business portfolio website, too. I'd just hesitate to recommend that in general, as my experience with GUI HTML5 builders has been that they aren't the best IDEs or text editors and I really quickly start to need one in order to be efficient.

[0] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easily-access-content-on.html

Yeah, just what've been saying for some time now. As Google is struggling for growth, it'll squeeze ad revenue off the extant web, turning it into a piece of shit even more than it is already. The same thing happened with eg. free PHPbb forum providers in early 2000s which were plastered with banner ads more and more (many mobile sites are like this already). I don't see a way that Google can win this race to the bottom, and neither do I see any reason for content creators to even bother with Google Search and Google Analytics; they will just direct your visitor's precious profile data to your competitor spending more on AdWord bids than you.

FYI: see also [1] and [2] as additional upcoming measures by Google

[1]: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/03/announcing-mobile-first-indexing-for.html

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCLxiN_dpjU

I had no idea that googlebot (and others) will sometimes POST to urls[0] - this seems like a terrible idea.

I imagine what happened to this guy is that somebody coded up a site that used his as a service and google spidered it and went crazy trying to follow the links. It sucks, but that is what robots.txt is for. Anything that requires more than just serving a page should be blocked.

You can drive yourself insane reading your logs trying to guess what bots are trying to achieve. They seem to excel at spidering exactly what you don't want while ignoring the content that would actually be useful.

The one time I did have a problem with a misbehaving crawler was with something called 80legs[1]

[0] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/11/get-post-and-safely-surfacing-more-of.html

[1] https://sheep.horse/2012/8/80legs_is_a_pain_in_the_neck.html