Report: Google AMP SERPs To Go Live Wednesday 24 February

[engine]

Advertising Age is reporting that Google's AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is to officially launch and go live on Wednesday 24th February.

Publishers, meanwhile, have been eagerly awaiting their chance to test AMP's efficacy in encouraging readership on mobile devices. The Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed and the Washington Post are among those who will have AMP sites ready next week.

A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on the date of AMP's roll-out. Report: Google AMP SERPs To Go Live Wednesday 24 February [adage.com]

Google's (AMP) Accelerated Mobile Pages - What's It All About [webmasterworld.com]

[JS_Harris]

Publishers, meanwhile, have been eagerly awaiting their chance to test AMP's efficacy in encouraging readership on mobile devices.

I wish they'd just clock my site and include me if I'm fast enough, period. I'm not down with that "required" 3rd party javascript file fetching.

[tangor]

They can roll out, meanwhile, I'll keep rolling as I am. Not against innovation or technology, just against anything that gets in the way or forces me to do things "their way".

The web ain't broke. Not even on the mobile side. I might be a Luddite at the moment, but just call me cautious as I can't see any benefit in AMP. At least for my websites.

Edit.... had a brain phart and came back:

Will there be a class action against G for segregating and elevating AMP pages above "ordinary pages" in the future? Will this become an anti-competition kind of thing? (If you ain't AMP'd you don't ramp?)

[EditorialGuy]

Will there be a class action against G for segregating and elevating AMP pages above "ordinary pages" in the future?

If there is, it will be a waste of time and money.

[FattyB]

I've been messing about with it today on one of my sites that use Wordpress. It is really just like having a separate mobile site again, so rather than one responsive site you have to generate these AMP pages. On likes of wordpress they are pretty basic but can add stuff back in. I guess the problem is that Google has really bad history with things like this. Whether it is authorship or The Pagespeed CDN etc.

However, if there is a mass move towards this sort of thing for mobile I'd rather be adding on something with Google than hosting content with Facebook...

[JS_Harris]

I think it's been made pretty clear at this point that they are looking at page speed and not at AMP inclusion as a rankings metric. Sites with AMP won't necessarily be fast and sites without AMP won't necessarily be slow. The wording around those "rankings perks" is odd but I think we've seen the same wording before with open graph tags and the like.

I would think that page speed plays a rather small role in rankings unless one site is consistently slow, in which case it gets treated as such and lose some rank until the problem is fixed. If you judge how important speed is by your GWT dashboard it would appear that Google has a 3 month memory about your site's speed and looks at averages, perhaps we should too.

[krsaborio]

AMP is not a good idea.

Instead of formulating a new format scheme, ampproject.org should focused on publishers that build horrendous websites (an inquisitive 'news' site comes to mind) with the purpose to educate them about good practices regarding good layout, etc.

Organizations that have embraced this AMP nonsense (like WordPress) should have taken a non 'me too' position.

[tangor]

HTTPS is required to get the full AMP experience. If you don't have it your site will not qualify for AMP advertising....

[IanTurner]

All I can say is where is WAP these days.

[johnhh]

all I can say - looks like a game of "Simons says"

[graeme_p]

ampproject.org should focused on publishers that build horrendous websites (an inquisitive 'news' site comes to mind) with the purpose to educate them about good practices regarding good layout, etc.

A lot of publishers will not listen. AMP is a way to get publishers who refuse to lighten their main websites to provide light mobile websites.

[JS_Harris]

AMP will not speed up my already fast site, I'm not implementing it. Forced HTTPS sounds grand too but after evaluating it my visitors would be exactly 0% safer on my static paged site, so that's not happening "just because" either. I implemented schema to later find out that my site benefited from a 0% increase in traffic because I didn't offer events and other things Google features. I also implemented authorship and, yeah... no.

If it doesn't benefit me or my visitors more than 0% it's not happening anymore, sorry G. Now excuse me while I try to figure out how to reverse a Panda smack from 2011, I wish Google would help me out by telling me how to fix THAT instead of these new things.

"Your site is faster than 91% of websites" - Good enough, if it's not broken...

[Andy Langton]

I've seen at least one test where using the same restrictions as AMP with normal HTML is faster than AMP (since you're forced to load AMP libraries).

That said, I've seen the implementation, and it's certainly faster than most of the publisher's usually offerings. But, I find the way that this has been pushed to be deceptive. There seems to be practically a marketing requirement that they're not referred to as "Google's" but rather "the open source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages" and other such things, presumably to conceal Google's new product behind a veil of open-source goodness.

From an announcement in October to live in search results in February, accompanied by an immediate Webmaster Tools report, and emails from Google telling us to use AMP.

Call me cynical, but I don't think the push is because AMP pages are a fantastically good thing for the web that Google happens to really love. The pages don't even work with javascript disabled unless you recreate the entire contents in a <noscript> tag!

[Swanny007]

My template is mobile friendly and very lightweight, no extra fluff at all. Why should I care? And does it matter for forums like this one or is it just for news sites?

[FattyB]

It does force you to think about what is on the page but I mean you can't run simple things like say share buttons unless they add that. You can run about 20 ad networks and a few analytics like Chartbeat. I did a test on the AMP pages we have and Pingdom ranks them faster than 99% of other sites. But we will only keep it if we get more traffic or see reduced bounce/more repeat on mobile. Otherwise its just another overhead.

[iamlost]

Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is not aimed at most of us. We are simply being allowed to give ourselves up as collateral inclusion. Nor is AMP a single bolt, rather one of (at least) three being shot at news organisations.

1. Digital News Initiative (DNI), a partnership with European news publishers, which includes:
* a 150 million Euro DNI Innovation Fund (currently ~30 million granted) 'incentive' for news organisations to (better) do their job.
Note: fascinating that even here when listing participating organisations G uses it's notorious partial bucket sort...

* product development in participation with news organisations to increase revenue, traffic and audience engagement.

* training and research
---dedicated Google staff to train news room staff
---partnerships with news organisations
---increased/enhanced tools and resources for journalists
Query: will G guarantee info served is correct, factual, and substantiated? If so, how?
---rebuilding Google Trends with journalist input
---extending Google Journalism Fellowships
...etc.

2. Project Shield née Jigsaw née Google Ideas to alleviate DDoS attacks on news organisations.

3. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project

Google is going after breaking information, which is many/most mobile users news interest. Whether such partnerships are (increasingly) lopsided is for individual news organisations to contemplate.

---

Google provides
* general search traffic to my sites. For that I am sincerely grateful and in turn provide googlebot limited site access.
* a nice (if these days, tertiary) AdSense revenue stream for which I am sincerely grateful.

However, I never ever thought that Google was doing anything for my benefit. Even the implicit exchanges noted above (indexing for traffic, ad page inclusion for ad revenue split) are subject to review. Simply because Google offers something doesn't mean that it is to anyone's benefit but theirs; when it is to others' benefit it may not be to everyone's. And it all is subject to change.

I do not participate in Google Site Search or Google Analytics...or any third party grab of my data.
I do not participate in Google's transcoding highjack aka Web Light nor will I permit their hosting of my content aka Accelerated Mobile Pages...or any third party grab of my content.
Nice tries, Google, but I slap folks that do that.

[anallawalla]

I agree with iamlost's views that AMP is for news organisations - I am annoyed by Google's use of that term exclusively (to mean news organisations) without making any reference to a wider group of people who think they are also "publishers".

I have yet to read up on AMP HTML, but it makes me wonder how many enterprise CMSs will be ready for it. Then there are AMP ads to consider.

[tangor]

AMP is a dumbing down or simplifying the web project which will end up working the same way, just with LESS and that makes all those data centers just that much more effective without spending a dime for resources.

Then again, there is a lot of commonsense attached to AMP, so I can't speak ill of the project.

However, clean code does the same thing and I like to pick my bells and whistles to attach... which AMP does not allow (easily) so I'm in the wait and see mode at the moment.

[Nutterum]

AMP is already ramping. If you ain't AMP you are not shown in news results - which by the way are on top. So it's not like AMP is getting rank boost. AMP is getting THE BOOST. Won't be surprised if they include non news carousel with "Amp content pages" for mobile, providing a shortcut to the top for your content.

This will be big folks. Not because it's good, but because Google want's it that way. So, as much as you hate it at least take the technology in to consideration.

P.S. Won't be surprised if they try to battle adblocks in a way that if you have adblocker you wont see AMP content type of deal in the future as well. Just my 2c.

[tangor]

Shattering/sharding the web is not a way to keep folks happy. Once the market perceives that there are two choices, and one of those corporate crony ad stuff sites instead of all choices all things sites there might be a backlash in either engagement or other services.

Poking through all the documentation and the partners, etc, it really looks like AMP is there to service news corps (think mega bucks sites) and advertising that g more closely controls. You might be encouraged to play the game, but the game is already rigged. Most expressly on mobile.

All are signs of the times, of course. But whose?

[Selen]

If you ain't AMP you are not shown in news results - which by the way are on top.

So yesterday 200+ of ranking factors determined these sites were great, but today one factor killed it all..? It's confusing. I guess people don't mind waiting a little longer if they expect a quality meal (in a fancy restaurant) than wait shorter to get a cold burger from a cheap kiosk..

[graeme_p]

the search titan said it won't favor AMP in particular among the search results it displays, it has long favored faster sites over slower ones when other things are equal

It sounds as though there are no "AMP SERPS" and this whole thread is based on a misconception. Unless there is evidence that they are lying and AMP sites get a boost over equally fast non-AMP sites?

[FattyB]

Well AMP shows at the top of SERPS for any big trending terms in the carousel, I'd imaging later you'll also see them in mobile search results further down...maybe with a little lightning bolt next to the results, a bit like it says mobile friendly at the moment. I'd also imagine AMP results will score higher for those sort of queries.

Every news and entertainment site I know is running it already or about to....as others have said whether it is good or bad if you run news or trending content then you need to be doing this as well I think.

[anallawalla]

FWIW, I found out yesterday that Google is also working with non-news sites to get them ready for AMP. Can't say too much at this stage, except that this is a B2C service business.

[graeme_p]

Well AMP shows at the top of SERPS for any big trending terms in the carousel

Because a whole lot of, previously very bloated, big, well known, sites with huge numbers of back-links, suddenly got a lot faster, and Google favours fast sites. AMP is just a low bloat platform. Is there a shred of evidence that AMP pages rank higher than other equally fast pages?

Every news and entertainment site I know is running it already or about to....as others have said whether it is good or bad if you run news or trending content then you need to be doing this as well I think.

No, you need to lose the bloat. The reason Google is aiming AMP at news and entertainment sites is that they are almost all horribly bloated.

[FattyB]

Well it does not matter whether they rank or not in general serps, though think they will outrank sites just as fast...and if they have some sort of symbol in general serps that will increase CTR anyway.

What I was pointing out is that because AMP site results show up top it makes general ranking for these sort of searches pretty meaningless anyway. Way over 50% of the clicks will go to something in that carousel, with Google's own ads you have almost nothing from normal serps visible on mobile without a google scroll. So fast or not you need to use AMP if you are in this beat and get significant Google traffic.

Also that is a gross generalisation, plenty of news and entertainment sites have very slick mobile sites and apps. Often they are the most highly tuned of sites due to the huge traffic they get and because it is very competitive. Plus in areas like news the weight your site has is way, way more important than speed in SERPS and Google News.

[graeme_p]

@FattyB, you make it sound as though there is a special section for AMP pages in a carousel. It is not something I have seen. Does it only contain AMP sites? Can other people confirm that?

[Nutterum]

@graeme_p - I tried for almost 20 minutes to find a mobile SERP page with news carousel not entirely filled with AMP pages. In the end I found one for Bauma (a big construction trade fair in Germany) news related search, which by they way I could not repeat (as in the carousel was gone). So yeah AMP is already a BIG factor.

This is only the beginning. I believe AMP will become a big signal for Google in the near future on mobile and will spill over to desktop. /tinfoilhaton

[Broadway]

Could someone give me some help on this point.

At this point in time is there any reason that an evergreen informational site should be serving AMP pages?

Isn't AMP just a "news" website phenomenon right now?
If I did serve AMP pages, would Google acknowledge/index them?

[Nutterum]

@Broadway - so long as you have relevant information - YES. AMP while made for news/blog type of content primarily is not limited only for these types of pages. I won't be surprised if I see entire websites and WP themes be design specifically around AMP in the near future.