Google’s AMP: Designed for Speeding up the Web by Changing How It Works

Google's announcement at Oct 7, 2015 about the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP), which "aims to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile website" or, alternatively, fragments the Internet by not fully supporting the very standards the web is built upon - depending on your point of view. As well as that announcement they have launched the AMP Project Website (which I discuss in more detail below). So is it a good and necessary step forward or a massively step backwards?

In August 02, 2016, Google announced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) would be moving beyond “Top Stories” into the main organic mobile search results. Today, AMP officially rolls out broadly in mobile search.

In this article I'll explain what is google AMP, How AMP Works, it's advantages & it's impact on google search results.

So, What's Google AMP?

Publishers are cooling on Facebook Instant Articles & Apple News, they’re becoming hot and heavy with Google AMP, the search engine giant’s answer to Instant Articles.

In February, 2016, Google rolled out AMP, which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, on mobile search results in Google News. Publishers scrambled to adopt Google’s open-source code on their pages because search still drives close to 40 percent of referral traffic overall, and they know that as their audiences shift to mobile, having fast mobile pages can only help them get surfaced by Google’s algorithm.

AMP's kind of  projects like the Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News.

So, let's talk about how this might actually show up in search results. So first of all, what we know at the moment AMP is  looking like it's mobile only. It's showing up as a carousel above the regular blue links, typically for news-related terms, because most of this is focused on obviously reading contents. The people who've rolled this out first have been mostly news & advertisement publishers Washington Post, USA Today Network, Gizmodo, WIRED, Slate Magazine, plista, Relay Media, etc. So you search for a news-related term. You can see this carousel of swipe-able images above the blue links. Click on one of those, it opens super fast, that's the whole point, and then you can swipe to another AMP page across the way.

Benefits of Accelerated Mobile Pages?

Speed Matters Most and Instant Loading is the Ideal Expectation. Research has shown higher bounce rates associated with slower-loading web pages. Using the AMP format will make it far more compelling for people to consume and engage with much more content.

AMP HTML is a way to build web pages for static content that render with reliable, fast performance. It is Google and Twitter's attempt to make really fast mobile pages. At its essence, it's basically a stripped-down form of HTML, a diet HTML if you will.

How Does AMP HTML work?

The AMP format is supported by a wide variety of platforms, including Google Search. If a web page listed in Google's search results has a valid AMP version website, Search may direct mobile users to the cached AMP.

All of Google Webmaster guidelines for making a site Google-friendly also apply to AMP. This article covers additional recommendations to help you and your website users take advantage of AMP's benefits. Here's a the summary:

Design: Create web pages according to the AMP specification.

Discovery: Make your AMP discoverable.

Validation: Test that your page is written in valid AMP HTML.

Structured data: Mark up your content with structured data.

Status: Monitor your AMP report on Search Console for errors.

But What About Advertisements?

Although JavaScript is mostly forbidden on AMP sites, there are some loopholes that allow publishers to include advertise, analytics, and other pieces of JavaScript on an AMP page.

AMP includes a special analytics tag that allows publishers and advertisers to send data to pre-screened analytics providers such as Adobe, Chartbeat, and Parse.ly. This is handled by a single JavaScript file instead of a separate script for each analytics provider. That file is loaded from Google’s own servers, which can speed things up considerably for pages that use multiple analytics providers. Ads work in a similar way.

The AMP Project vets analytics servers based on performance, security, and privacy, so some of the worst offenders may be screened out. But those who want to use analytics code or other pieces of JavaScript library that haven’t been pre-approved can also use the <amp-iframeiframe> tag.

The <amp-iframeiframe> tag, similar to the traditional HTML version of the <iframe> tag, allows publishers and advertisers to add blurbs of JavaScript hosted on their own websites, but there are some restrictions too. Code inserted into iFrames won’t have access to all the data that a script inserted directly into a traditional page does. AMP always loading the page’s core content before any <amp-iframeiframe> content in order to keep <amp-iframeiframe>s from slowing down pages. And when AMP pages are hosted on Google’s servers, the pages are pre-rendered, so that they still load quickly.

These workarounds enable more freedom for publishers and advertisers, but it also means there’s still room for them to serve invasive scripts to readers. Improved performance won’t always mean improved security, and privacy. It also means more of the web will be shaped by Giant like Google & Twitter.

AMP Supported Browsers?

In general AMP supports the 2 latest versions of major browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari and Opera. AMP support desktop, phone, tablet and the web view version of these respective browsers.

Beyond that, the core AMP library and built-in elements should aim for very wide browser support and accept fixes for all browsers with market share greater than 1 percent.

In particular, Google try to maintain "it might not be perfect but isn't broken"-support for the Android 4.0 system browser and Chrome 28+ on phones.

How AMP works in Mobile Device?

Google has published a great tutorial on how to create your first AMP page. We will go through a quick rundown on what is involved and what you need to know. It is important to know how AMP works in SERPs. In most cases, Google will only serve AMP pages to mobile devices. However, Google does not penalize users who have AMP-only pages (i.e. no additional HTML desktop version) such as the ampproject itself. Google has a preview up but you can emulate it from your desktop using Chrome DevTools.

AMP Page Specialty:

• Allows only asynchronous scripts
• All CSS must be inlined
• Styles are limited to 50KB
• External resources like images must state their size in HTML
• All Javascript must be out of critical path
• No user written Javascript is allowed, only AMP supported
• Fonts must be loaded with a link tag or a CSS @font-face rule

AMP Impact on the Google SERPs

Simply put, AMP will affect huge in search engine optimization. After all, Google is committed to pushing mobile-first index in which mobile-friendly websites received a rankings boost. The difference here, however, is that AMP is not a ranking factor; at least it isn’t one as of now. This was confirmed in a Google+ Hangout with Google Webmaster trend analyst John Mueller.

AMP will affect in Google SEO in regards to impressions, clicks, user experience, and of course, website speed. Speed is a crucial factor to ranking well on Google and the company reported last year that, “29 percent of Smartphone users will immediately switch to another site or app if it doesn’t satisfy their needs,” and that “. . .of those who switch, 70 percent do so because of lagging load times.”

Yet no matter if AMP is a current organic ranking signal or not, the chances of it becoming one are relatively high as a Google's January 20, 2016 Announcement, which delved into the ad experience on AMP stated that, “We can’t emphasize enough that this is just the start,” and that Google is, “. . .invested for the long term.” With how heavily Google underlined the importance of mobile-friendliness with Mobilegeddon, it would come as no surprise if Google one day made AMP a ranking factor as well; possibly even as soon as its mobile update this May.

Do you think Google will make AMP compliance a ranking factor? I don’t know if Google will make AMP a ranking factor or not but AMP will be a real headache for publishers, that is certain. In order to keep up and not lose positions they will be forced to learn everything about Google AMP.

SEO Your AMP Pages?

By having an AMP version of your post or page you don’t want to get dinged for duplicate content, so Google requires that you use the canonical tag when linking to pages.

Google will automatically detect AMP pages on your site as your original page is served with a header tag directing Googlebot to your AMP page.

What Can You Do To Prepare?

There's two things. Firstly, you want to be able to start building AMP pages for your site, and you want to make sure that those pages are valid, because as we said, it's like a diet version of HTML, but it's very, very strict on how you build the HTML. The tags have to be in certain orders and certain places. You can't use certain things. And if you do any of that, your AMP page is invalid and they probably won't be using it.

There are several ways available to validate an AMP document. They will all produce the exact same result, so use whichever one suits your development style the most.

Chrome Developer Console:

To validate your AMP pages, you can use a tool that's built into Chrome. So if you open the developer tools in Chrome, there's a system there — and you can look it up on the AMP project website — where you can actually go to a page and you can ask it to validate, "Is this an AMP page," and it will tell you any problems with that page.

Web Interface:

There's also a Web Interface available at validator.ampproject.org. This interface shows errors displayed inline alongside the HTML source of the page. The interface is an interactive editor: changes to the html source result in interactive revalidation.

Chrome:Browser Extension:
The AMP Validator can be accessed directly from your browser's toolbar using a browser extension. As you browse, it will automatically validate each AMP page visited and gives a visual indication of the validity of the page as a colored icon.

Summery: Want to Convert your site to Google AMP? Contact Us Today & we'll get back to you.

Do You Make Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Too Complicated?

The week is coming to an end again and I'm holding you a moment off the weekend to present you the best SEO News of the last week. Do You Make Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Too Complicated? What is SEO? How does 301 Redirect affect SEO? Questions about questions and I'm OK to answer you again. Have fun while reading this article.

In search engine optimization, there are many methods can be used to increase any website search engine organic ranking. Prior to execute any strategy, goals must first be defined. A suitable strategy can then be developed from these goals. There are a few simple questions you can ask yourself:

What is the purpose of my website?: Do I want to generate leads? Do I want to sell a product? Do I want to distribute content? The purpose of a website is directly dependent on the goal to be defined first.

What will I achieve?: Is it revenue based? User based? Traffic based? The definition of what you want is crucial to the success of the strategy.

How can I measure my success?: After you know what you want to achieve, you have to know how to measure your success. If, for example, you want to generate leads, you need not only traffic on the website, the traffic must also need to convert to leads. What will bring you a thousand visitors when none of them convert?

Who are my competitors?: knowing your competitors is important. By monitoring the competition, you can easily identify and exploit gaps in their SEO strategy.

Once the goals are set, a strategy must be developed. In doing so, it is important to keep the focus on the objectives and to sort out everything that does not correspond to your goal. At this stage of the process, you should already consider the partners you need to work with. In order to operate successful SEO strategy, sometimes, you may have to rely on others at some points.

The next phase of the process is to review the results. The focus should be on everything that has a clear influence on the achievement of the goal. There are four simple questions to be asked.

• What has worked?
• What did not work?
• Why did not it work?
• What's next?

The aim of these questions is to find out if you are on the right path. At some points you can not answer all these questions. Through the questions you make sure that you does not lose the focus. One of the most important questions is the fourth one.

After all the results have been analyzed & solved the question, time adjustments have to be made. Based on the collected data, the strategy can be reoriented and improvements can be made to achieve the goal and restart the process further.

Google New Page Speed & Mobile Friendly Tool before: The new All-In-One tool from Google allows website owner or webmaster to check the Mobile friendliness, mobile speed & desktop speed in no time. As with the Google PageSpeed ​​Insights Tool, the user is given helpful tips on how to fix the issue.

301 Redirect?: A 301 redirect is the HTTP status code for when a page has been moved permanently to a new location or URL.

With a 301 redirect, the value of inbound links as well as historic/trust records for one URL will move to the other, though there’s debate as to just how much of this benefits are passed on to the new URL.

301 redirects are particularly useful in the following circumstances:

• You've moved your site to a new domain, and you want to make the transition as seamless as possible.
• People access your site through several different URLs. If, for example, your home page can be reached in multiple ways - for instance, http://example.com/home, http://home.example.com, or http://www.example.com - it's a good idea to pick one of those URLs as your preferred (canonical) destination, and use 301 redirects to send traffic from the other URLs to your preferred URL.
• You're merging two websites and want to make sure that links to outdated URLs are redirected to the correct pages.

To implement a 301 redirect properly for your websites that are hosted on servers running Apache, you'll need access to your server's .htaccess file.

New Google Accelerated Mobile Pages: Google AMP is still rising. More and more websites offering AMP versions for their mobile users.

Ads on AMP Website Study by AMP Project

Google's Project Amp prevails slowly but surely, and more and more sites offer a quick AMP version of the content, which can be loaded much faster on smartphones. Since, of course, such websites must also be financed, Google has made possible a number of advertising forms from the beginning, which are now to be expanded. Soon there will be three new forms of advertising.

• Sticky Ads
• Flying Carpet Ads
• AMP Ads for Pages

Read More From AMP Blog.

Google’s New Mobile Index

Tuesday, August 02, 2016, Google Announced at their Webmaster Central Blog that it will be changing the way it evaluates web pages for mobile searches. With more than 3.49 billion people worldwide using the Internet regularly and nearly 2.5 billion who do so from a mobile phone, according to data from InternetLiveStats, this could have a huge impact on your brand’s SEO efforts.

Read More: The State of Mobile Marketing 2015 [Infographic]

Furthering its push to improve services for mobile users, Google has decided to start indexing search results for mobile separately from desktop to offer mobile users better and fresher content.

In the past, mobile search results were based on the version of your website that’s presented to a user when they visit via a desktop computer. However, many websites have a separate, stripped-down version that’s presented to mobile visitors, so the user experience and value of websites aren't always consistent even though mobile searches return the same results as the desktop version.

Google’s solution is to split its index of web pages into two parts, one for desktop and one for mobile, to provide the best user experience on each device. Each user’s search results will be dependent on the device they’re browsing from—desktop or mobile. This is a problem for brands who have stripped valuable content from their mobile sites and it may lead to lower search rankings on mobile devices.

According to Search Engine Land, the move will eventually see the newly introduced search index become the primary one. The standard desktop index will remain active, but it won’t be updated as frequently.

This is going to have the largest impact on rankings once this new index is fully implemented. You can check if your website is mobile friendly by using Google’s Mobile Friendly Testing Tool.

There are many ways that you can make your website mobile friendly, so i recommend reaching out to your web designer in regards to this. If you are the one that makes the edits to your website, here are three simple steps that you can take to ensure you’re providing a good mobile experience that keeps both your visitors and Google happy:

Consider Adding AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages): AMP Pages are designed to make your website’s pages load a lot quicker on mobile phones. This project was actually designed by both Google and Twitter to help optimize mobile searches. Essentially, it is a stripped down form of HTML that still provides necessary design/information, but has less information to load.

AMP Facts:

• AMP is Open-source that aims to improve the performance of the mobile web.
• AMP HTML can load anywhere from 15% to 85% faster than then non-AMP versions of those pages.
• Pages that run on the AMP HTML will mean much faster mobile web for users, and for publishers using AMP a potential boost in google organic search rankings.
• The little ‘lightning bolt’ symbol next to the result is meant to convey a faster loading time to users.
• AMP is getting deployed across more web content, even ads.
• AMP has more sharing Options.
• AMP Pages can be shown in a carousel that lets you easily switch articles.
• AMP is Under Constant Development.

You can read more about AMP Pages Here and how to implement them into your website.

Create A Mobile-Optimized Website: Website Any concession to mobile users is better than nothing. There are a few ways that you can optimize your existing website for mobile devices.

For Instance, you can create a completely separate version of your website for mobile devices. Many times, these are hosted on a sub-domain such as http://m.example.com. While this option will require additional web development, it can be done without impacting the desktop version of your website. This is the most common route for getting a mobile site up quickly.

Another method is to use responsive design. This will allow your website to match the dimensions of the browser, rearranging the content on a page to fit the available space. This approach provides a good user experience on any device size, but it does require a fair amount of work to implement.

Whatever solution you choose will signal to Google that your website is “mobile-friendly” and deserves a place in the index. From there, it’s just a matter of optimization.

Read More: Fundamentals of Responsive Web Design

Optimize Your Visitor’s Mobile Experience: Now that Google will be viewing your mobile website as a completely self-standing entity, you’ll need to optimize the mobile version of your site in the same manner that you optimize your desktop site. That means you’ll have to work at improving both the user experience and Google search rankings through a mobile-first lens.

From a technical perspective, Google offers a tool that will test your website for mobile-friendliness and offer suggestions for fixing the issues. This is a quick way to identify issues with your mobile website.

In addition, Google’s Search Console provides a good resource for both desktop and mobile issues. Formerly called Google Webmaster Tools, Search Console will show you if Google has detected any errors on your website, alerts you about malware complaints, and gives you insights into how your site appears in Google’s index.

Next, it’s just a matter of optimizing your content. Google doesn't provide any guidelines on that front, but I can infer that they want more than just a light version of the corresponding desktop page.

Don’t Skimp on Content: One of the objectives behind Google’s decision to split their index is to discourage website owners from stripping out valuable information from their websites in order to provide a faster loading site. While both site owners and Google are pursuing the same objective—to provide a good user experience— Google doesn't think that sacrificing depth of content is the way to achieve it, and neither should you. And now that the mobile version of your website won’t benefit from the content on your desktop version, Google is forcing website owners to make sure that content is available to be crawled by their mobile ranking algorithm.

Keep An Eye On Your Rankings: AMP Pages are designed to make your website’s pages load a lot quicker on mobile phones. This project was actually designed by both Google and Twitter to help optimize mobile searches. Essentially, it is a stripped down form of HTML that still provides necessary design/information, but has less information to load.

Keep a lookout for your rankings over the next few months to see if your website is affected.

This Announcement was only made two months ago, so as more updates come out in the SEO community I will make sure to update this Post for you.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask on the comment section.

The State of Mobile Marketing 2015 [Infographic]

Did you adjusted your online marketing strategy to accommodate the rapidly growing number of mobile users currently interacting online?

The rapid rise of smartphone and tablet adoption has affected almost every aspect of digital marketing. The impact ranges from the most recent 'Mobile-friendly' algorithm changes to Google's smartphone search results through to the lower conversion rates on smartphones, use of social media on mobile and ensuring that our emails are mobile-friendly.

JBH Marketing & Smart Insights put together this infographic that details the state of mobile marketing in 2015, and some of the statistics and data is staggering. For one, the percentage of time spent on a mobile app in 2015 is 86%, and 79% of smartphone users say they use apps almost every day. Keep that in mind next time you're trying to decide if your business needs a mobile app.

I hope this compilation of statistics about Mobile Marketing in 2015 to be useful - please share if it is and we'll continue to update it in 2015.

Related Post:

Search Marketing in 2015