With Google changing the game again and releasing their AMP pages, the internet has been turned over, people have begun taking sides -- both for, and against -- and a lot of people are left wondering exactly what it means for their business.
Without a doubt, this is one of the biggest shakeups in the SEO industry that has happened in the last few years, but Google is promising that the Accelerated Mobile Pages program will both change the web and make accessing your favorite pages even quicker.
Smartphones and tablets have revolutionized the way we consume content and access information, but with the rise in popularity, a large number of web developers and publishers were having issues with the different screen sizes and operating systems, when it comes to accurately displaying the pages on their site.
Previously, fully responsive designs made big pushes to help standardize the mobile industry, but as technology rapidly evolves, keeping up with the changing times presented more problems than what developers were able to keep up with -- specifically, Google.
Then, in February 2016, Google released their AMP update that allows publishers to build lightweight web pages that look great and function flawlessly across a wide range of devices.
As time goes on, Google is promising to release even more updates to the AMP protocol, allowing publishers to implement new ad types for increased monetization, along with new content types to help make their stories and articles more attractive, and stand out against their competition.
The best, most basic way to describe AMP is that users are being served pages that are stripped down versions of the full desktop version, and they’re delivered from Google’s own caching servers rather than (sometimes) unreliable servers that publishers host their sites on.
A lot of publishers are torn, though. On one hand, the new AMP pages load lightning fast, in less than 1 second in most cases, but also provide a stripped down user experience, meaning that a large majority of most major website’s functions have been removed.
While it is still too soon to tell exactly what’s going to happen with AMP, especially with Google’s history of releasing products that have eventually failed and become phased out, one thing is certain: Google and Facebook are going head to head against each other to change how we access the web where mobile devices are concerned.
Enter Facebook Vs. Google
With each major advertising company vying for more of a “land grab” when it comes to digital real estate, these evolutions only make sense. Each company wants to become the internet itself, and the more real estate they control means the more money they can make.
Facebook Instant Articles was well received, mainly due to the fact that Facebook allows publishers to gain access to data and keep 100% of the revenue they generate from ads on their articles. This is a huge difference from Google, who offers between 40% and 60% of ad revenues as incentive.
The key differences between the two are based in how they handle code that is being loaded every time you open a web page. Facebook utilizes Javascript, where Google intends to kill off Javascript and other slow loading aspects of most web designs.
They both do away with third-party scripts. That means all of your existing ads, even your Analytics, will fail to load in Google’s new AMP pages. Facebook Instant Articles provides you internal data that you can use, while Google is still working on a solution.
Where most developers are having issues with the new AMP protocol is that there is little to no control over the pages themselves. AMP strips out a majority of code, including CSS, images, videos, and other assets, choosing to render what they want, rather than what you’ve designed into the page.
While it’s easy to see why Google and Facebook are both doing this, it presents problems with AMP-only or Instant Articles-only code tags that subvert HTML code that has been utilized on the web for years.
Both platforms are attempting to make their own code subsets, which will require that developers keep up with the changes rather than simply using what already works. This can present a lot of problems down the road.
Publishers, so far, have been losing because of the battle between these two goliaths.
On one hand, traffic numbers are increasing with the change in the search results pages, while on the other hand, ad revenues are dropping when compared to fully responsive and mobile-specific web designs.
How It (AMP) Works
The open-source AMP HTML framework meshes with existing HTML code, but strips down a lot of the “slow” parts of HTML and allows publishers to create lightweight versions of their webpages.
AMP HTML is exactly the same as HTML5, with a few key differences.
First, the optimization is powered by Javascript and styled with CSS, but the pages are cached by Google’s servers so that it reduces load on web hosting servers and provides a way for Google to quickly serve up the page when a user requests it.
Caching is essential to AMP. Without it, visitors would still be relying on web hosts around the world to serve up the pages, rather than Google’s servers being able to track visitors by their location and serve up a pre-cached page from a server closest to them.
AMP pages are completely separate from a mobile optimized or fully responsive website.
Google still puts emphasis on the desktop version of your site. Both the mobile and AMP versions of your site will be annotated as alternates, provided you use the proper markup.
When a mobile user searches for a keyword on Google, Google will serve up AMP pages first and foremost, while the standard search results will contain the preferred version of the page, depending on what the publisher has chosen.
While there are major restrictions on the types of ads and trackers that publishers can use on their AMP articles, they still have multiple different solutions for monetizing their content. As of right now, both DoubleClick and OpenX are compatible with AMP. Both are two of the largest advertising networks on the internet today.
Should You Implement AMP?
AMP has been rolled out to help news publishers, but is relevant to many different types of businesses.
Everything from eCommerce organizations to large brands are able to utilize the AMP project to increase their search traffic and make their website more friendly to the growing mobile user base.
For instance, eBay has been one of the earliest adopters of the AMP project, showcasing nearly 8 million different search results for everything from camera drones to Sony Playstation related queries. After implementation, eBay reported a nearly 15% increase in their traffic, based solely on AMP related searches.
The commercial incentive alone is enough for many different companies to begin implementing AMP pages. As more companies begin to adopt the technology, it is going to become a standard online, almost requiring other companies to follow suit. Being one of the companies to adopt AMP early on is providing big benefits to their bottom line.
Given how Google is prioritizing AMP pages in their search results, adoption has been strong. Companies that are battling for mobile ad dollars are relishing how easy it has been to send more of that coveted traffic to their own pages, versus allowing their competitors to continue taking a larger piece of the pie.
The biggest pushback has come from Google attempting to keep AMP publishers inside of their own advertising network, which has caused a drop in revenue for some publishers. Only time will tell if ads are more successful in the standard mobile web, or if AMP revenues will continue to increase as the technology evolves.
Because the technology is so new, many developers have been scrambling, trying to figure out how to make it work. As time goes on, though, AMP is going to become a more influential factor in how web pages are created and displayed. This isn’t another one of Google’s failed programs.
Google spent years trying to force mobile responsive websites, and even released algorithms that were designed specifically to show mobile responsive versions of pages over the desktop versions, in a wide variety of search results.
With their latest push, all of the testing they put into getting publishers to adopt mobile responsive designs has paid off, and isn’t going away anytime soon. If you are a publisher in today’s internet landscape, regardless of your industry, you want to look into incorporating AMP into your design.
It’s smart business, and will open the gates for you, as an early adopter, to be first to market in your specific industry.
Why It Works
Mobile devices tend to bring with it mobile networks. And mobile networks can be unreliable and slow. Google listened to exactly what searchers are wanting, and attempted to deliver exactly that: fast loading web pages, regardless of the connection speed or device.
If Google is able to offer the fastest results, and searchers don’t have to wait around for pages to load, they are going to maintain the lion’s share of the internet traffic and keep themselves ahead of the market.
Google also has incentives to keep people on the mobile web. They currently own 5 of the 9 most popular mobile apps, where their current market share is far less certain. Mobile app developers are always evolving to meet with the times, so Google had to follow suit or get left behind.
What AMP Means For SEO
As of right now, AMP is not a direct factor in how your website ranks in the search results, and you aren’t going to be punished if you don’t adopt the AMP technology.
You also aren’t going to see a massive boost in your search rankings if you happen to implement it, either.
Before you can rank highly in the search results, you have to satisfy all of the other algorithm requirements first. This hasn’t changed, even after the AMP movement.
However, speed matters now, more than ever. If there are two articles that are exactly the same across the board, as far as the other ranking signals go, and one is able to load faster than the other, the page that loads quicker is going to get preferential treatment in the search results.
AMP is also able to indirectly influence where pages land in the search results, based on ranking factors that are baked into the current algorithms. For instance, if an AMP page generates more clicks with fewer bounces, Google is going to assume that the page is valuable and end up ranking it above other pages that may have bounce rate issues.
Most SEOs in the industry expect AMP to have a significant impact on the way search results are handled, especially those that are being queried from mobile devices, or are specifically tailored to mobile related keywords.
Pitfalls To Be Aware Of
With every other change in technology, you can expect a wide range of benefits, along with a few pitfalls that you’ll need to navigate your way through if you want to come out on top.
Now that the technology has been rolled out around the globe, more developers are coming forward with automated methods for implementing it into your pages without dealing with potentially breaking something.
To give you an idea, think of where SEO was at just a few short years ago. You had to hard-code everything into your pages, from the meta tags to canonical tags, and more. Now, plugins such as All In One SEO and WordPress SEO make life easy. All you have to do is fill in the blanks.
AMP plugins for WordPress websites function the same way. If you’re using WordPress to manage your website, implementing AMP onto your pages is fairly straightforward, and can be accomplished by installing the official plugin.
If you’re on another platform, or happen to hard-