With 600 mil­lion AMP-enabled resources now indexed, the con­sen­sus is out on Accel­er­at­ed Mobile Pages. Most will agree that AMPs are now a vital part of mobile SEO. There are, how­ev­er, still some remain­ing ques­tions. Daniel Board­man, Head of SEO at hop­pa, writes…

What is AMP?

So first things first, for those who haven’t yet heard of the AMP Project, here’s what we’re look­ing at:

For many, read­ing on the mobile web is a slow, clunky and frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ence — but it doesn’t have to be that way. The Accel­er­at­ed Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open source ini­tia­tive that embod­ies the vision that pub­lish­ers can cre­ate mobile opti­mized con­tent once and have it load instant­ly every­where.

- The AMP Project

In sim­pler terms still:

AMP stands for ‘Accel­er­at­ed Mobile Pages’ and has been a grow­ing buzz­word since the project’s inclu­sion in mobile SERPs back in Feb­ru­ary of this year. AMP was devel­oped as a way of serv­ing sta­t­ic pages’ con­tent in a quick, stripped-down, heav­i­ly cached way for mobile devices. This puts speed above all else and works towards pro­vid­ing a good user expe­ri­ence, some­thing we all know Google has as core aim, in fact, it’s the first point in its com­pa­ny phi­los­o­phy…

1. “Focus on the user and all else will follow”

(From Google’s “Ten things we know to be true”.)

So far, this tech­nol­o­gy has been wide­ly adopt­ed. Pub­lish­ers such as the Dai­ly Mail, The Inde­pen­dent, The FT, ABC News, CNN and Thril­list amongst many oth­ers are pre­dom­i­nant­ly the kinds of sites who have tak­en advan­tage of this. These sites all work to serve sta­t­ic con­tent to their users quick­ly, and so is per­fect­ly suit­ed to the tech­nol­o­gy avail­able.

What we have seen in recent months is some e‑commerce sites start to take advan­tage. The most notable of which was eBay, who launched with their AMPs as recent­ly as July and trans­ferred over 8 mil­lion pages of con­tent to AMP.

Is this a sign of things to come? Yes, prob­a­bly. Most expect Google to con­tin­ue to sup­port the project and enable more func­tion­al­i­ty inside of AMP to allow more sites to make the tran­si­tion — after all with over 5,000 devel­op­ers work­ing on the Github repos­i­to­ry of Google’s AMPs – it’s got­ten a few peo­ple excit­ed. At this stage, you may be inter­est­ed in learn­ing the pit­falls of the tech and what’s stop­ping every­one jump­ing over today?

The restrictions of AMP

As Ted­dy Roo­sevelt once said, “with great vic­to­ry, comes great sac­ri­fice”.

What are some of the restric­tions of AMP?

Not all con­tent works with AMP.

• Can’t use impro­vised or third-par­ty JavaScript, only from a pre­de­ter­mined library.
• Cus­tom styling doesn’t car­ry across.
• No exter­nal CSS, must be inline and less than 50kb.
• Images must state their size.
• Will require some addi­tion­al devel­op­er resource.
• Poten­tial dupli­ca­tion if canon­i­cal­iza­tion is imple­ment­ed incor­rect­ly.

So there’s a bit to con­sid­er. But if you did want to explore the ins and outs of the imple­men­ta­tion process, head over to the AMP Project itself for tech-info and tuto­ri­als on how to get start­ed.

The bitterness of experience

“By three meth­ods we may learn wis­dom: First, by reflec­tion, which is noblest; Sec­ond, by imi­ta­tion, which is eas­i­est; and third by expe­ri­ence, which is the bit­ter­est.”

- Con­fu­cius

We know that if Google wants some­thing to become the ‘norm’ that it slow­ly ramps up the pos­i­tive rank­ing sig­nals asso­ci­at­ed with that fea­ture (or at least promis­es it will be reward­ed in some way). Just as it promised back in 2014 that the imple­men­ta­tion of https:// would put site own­ers in good stead.

It’s a fair assump­tion that Google may do the same here, for years it’s val­ued good UX and reward­ed speedy sites, so there’s noth­ing, in par­tic­u­lar, to make us think oth­er­wise. Google’s Gary Illyes has some­what cryp­ti­cal­ly men­tioned the poten­tial for this: “Cur­rent­ly, AMP is not a mobile rank­ing fac­tor. How­ev­er, it could be in the future”.

The sit­u­a­tion is now look­ing pret­ty strong – a quick­er site should equal bet­ter usabil­i­ty, improved con­ver­sion rates, and more sales. In addi­tion, the pos­i­tive effect on impres­sions, clicks and UX are def­i­nite­ly not some­thing to be ignored. Pair that up with the dan­gling cher­ry of poten­tial­ly improved vis­i­bil­i­ty and increased traf­fic lat­er down the road and those ‘cons’ up there are start­ing to look a lot more worth it. Although not cur­rent­ly a rank­ing fac­tor, Google hosts rel­e­vant AMPs in a carousel at the top of mobile SERPs, so it’s as good as. In addi­tion to that, back in August, Google announced the AMP expan­sion into the rest of mobile SERPs so there’s no sign of stop­ping the AMP hype-train in the short-term!

The Decision

The deci­sion now comes down to whether this is right for your site. Can you cope with restric­tions on JavaScript and CSS? Can you find the addi­tion­al devel­op­ment resource to imple­ment a move to AMP? Will the speed ben­e­fits you get make that dif­fer­ence (what if your mobile site is already light­ning fast?)? We feel Google will push this hard­er over the com­ing 18 months and encour­age as many adopters as pos­si­ble. There are already more than 600 mil­lion AMP-enabled, index­able resources out there… will you be adding to it?

That doesn’t mean this is the cor­rect course of action for your site.

Any­one who’s been around for a cou­ple of years will remem­ber the likes of the Google Author­ship markup and the AJAX crawl­ing scheme, both of which aren’t sup­port­ed in the ways they once were, whether dropped or super­seded for var­i­ous rea­sons, but it’s per­ti­nent to remem­ber that Google can, and does, change direc­tion quick­ly – so exer­cise cau­tion.

What do you think? Will AMP be the new face of mobile going for­ward – or will we see it depre­ci­ate with advance­ments in oth­er code and brows­er tech­nolo­gies?

Either way – if AMPs can be imple­ment­ed on your site with min­i­mal resource and cost, then it may be a quick win that will deliv­er enough of a short term return to make it worth­while, whilst being in the best pos­si­ble sit­u­a­tion for future devel­op­ments.

So is it the future of mobile SEO? Yes, for now at least.