So what exactly is Google AMP?
Before everyone gets all bent out of shape, this is not some drastic, scary change to the interweb that will change our lives forever. At least for the time being, Google AMP (and similar e.g. Facebook Instant Articles) is mostly focused on articles distribution as opposed to say regular “About Us” type webpages, Ecom websites or other sites with non content-distribution functions. For starters, you can find out more about Google AMP by going right to the source here and reading up on the details for yourself. If you aren’t tech inclined and want to brush past all the fluff to get to the nitty gritty of what exactly Google AMP is, then keep reading.
To put it as “laymany” as I can, Google AMP is a new framework (developed by Google and others) that will greatly speed up your mobile webpage browsing experience. So essentially when you visit a Google AMP based page, it will load almost instantly. We all know that currently when you visit a mobile website, it can sometimes be quite painful, waiting for images and ads to load. AMP aims to remove that wait time. With the future (and present frankly) being so mobile focused (yes most of us check email, facebook, online articles while walking across the grocery store parking lot or sitting on the couch using our mobile devices), Google is pushing to drastically improve our browsing experience on the very devices we tote with us everywhere we go.
Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress.com, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Adobe Analytics and LinkedIn are among the first group of technology partners integrating AMP HTML pages. You yourself can now integrate AMP into your WordPress sites with this AMP plugin. Google AMP, in its essence, comes with a set of restrictions on how you code your HTML to ensure the page performance remains enhanced. Also the AMP JS resource library manages your resource loading helping the pages render more quickly. AMP pages indexed by Google are not redirecting visitors to your site, instead they get served a cached copy of your page from Google’s CDN. AMP uses asynchronous resource loading which basically means everything loads at the same time as opposed to one element after the next.
For those interested, here is a quicky tech video explaining AMP.
Why do I care?
Well Google has started rolling out AMP articles across it’s search terms and AMP pages are topping the charts (literally) when you do a Google search, displacing organic content. This, combined with Google’s increased importance on ads, means that AMP pages are getting highlighted right at the top of the search results (in Google’s new AMP carousel).
In order for Google to even notice your AMP pages, you’ve got to make sure that your code is 100% free from errors. Thankfully there’s a tool to help validate your pages. No JavaScript is allowed on your page except that provided by the AMP Project, which can definitely impact what your page “can do” in a multitude of ways. No forms or input fields are allowed (although there is apparently a way to “hack” the placement of lead-capturing forms using the tag). All styles must be in one style tag which is limited to 50kb and no external stylesheets or inline stylesheets are allowed. All of this is to say that the page is VERY simple in terms of what it can do; basically display a title, some text, an image and hyperlinks.
A number of the most popular ad networks (Amazon A9, AdReactor, Google AdSense, AOL, AdTech etc.) are currently using the extended component which means ad networks are adopting AMP, so if you use any of the popular ad groups your pages will need to conform. For anyone wondering if there will be analytics support, the answer is yes, unsurprisingly Google Analytics has some tagging options available.
How will it affect my business?
Accelerated Mobile Pages will likely get a boost in search rankings due to their faster load times. Considering the importance Google places on page load times it’s a no brainer to assume Google will give ranking preference. Faster rendering times will result in more pageviews and more ad views which will promote ad-based marketing something that is important to Google. This is all to say that AMP are likely here to stay and will only grow in importance.
For those of you that value the importance of content development and distribution as a part of your marketing efforts as well as your Google SERP rankings, it might be time to take AMP seriously and consider making the necessary changes to your code!