Last week Google introduced the “Accelerated Mobile Pages” (AMP) project together with Twitter and several news websites. AMP allows you to provide reduced versions of your website in Google, which load faster on mobile devices. With this project, Google responds to the recent new programs of Facebook and Apple that make mobile surfing faster: Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News.
How Does AMP Work?
AMP is an open source initiative and is based on AMP HTML, a new open framework built entirely with existing web technologies. AMP restricts the use of HTML, CSS and Javascript in order to reduce the HTTP requests. In addition, AMP files can be cached in the cloud. Google provides a cache that can be used for free for every website.
The technical specifications for AMP HTML are available on GitHub. WordPress already created a plugin for the AMP specifications. Other Content Management Systems will hopefully follow.
The project will be launched completely in 2016. You can already try it out by clicking on this link to Google Search on your smartphone. The following demo shows how AMP works in Google.
Who Can Use AMP?
AMP was launched in collaboration with several major news websites like ZEIT ONLINE, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Financial Times, Guardian, The New York Times and Buzzfeed. In addition, the social networks Twitter and LinkedIn already support AMP pages. AMP is available for all types of websites and content like news articles, videos, blog posts, pictures and GIFs.
Consequences of AMP for SEO and Web Analytics
According to Google, AMP pages will not be favored over other websites in Google Search. But as page speed is a relevant ranking factor, we expect AMP pages to achieve better ranking positions in mobile search.
Most websites will probably provide the same content on AMP and on regular HTML pages. In this case, make sure to avoid duplicate content issues. The canonical tag is a possible solution. Google might possibly release specific guidelines about the handling of duplicate content due to AMP.
AMP currently only supports Analytics if it does not use any Javascript. There are plans to create an analytics library that can report to various existing analytics provider backends.
With the AMP project, we can look forward to a faster mobile Internet. At the moment there are still many open questions about the implementation. We will keep you updated.
