There’s a new section in the Search Console - Accelerated Mobile Pages!

What are Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)?

AMP – the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is specialised framework for delivering webpages really fast.  This is of tremendous benefit to us poor 3G Smartphone owners who are tired of waiting for bloated webpages to load.

How do Accelerated Mobile Pages work?

There’s nothing especially different about an AMP webpage – it’s still HTML CSS and Javascript just like most webpages are.  However, the open source project provides a framework for aggressively performance optimised delivery. 

AMP uses a variety of pretty interesting tricks, such as:

• Telling the browser to pre-render the document before you even click – but only the above the fold stuff to keep down overheads
• Resources declare their sizes up front – this means the space for these elements can be reserved as the resources themselves are loaded asynchronously – no more jerking around the page as the images load.
• Google have thrown in their support, offering a service that delivers AMP HTML documents via their CDN

It looks something like this on the Search Results pages, according to this post by Google

Should I convert my web pages to AMP?

From what we’ve seen so far, AMP is mobile only and given its static content focus is most likely to be seen initially rolled out for delivering news content, so don’t shout at your web development team just yet if your job is to do SEO for ecommerce websites. 

Why you shouldn’t convert your website to AMP. Yet…

I’m all about web performance, so I’ll be the first to register my interest in a lean, fast html framework.  However, there are still some issues to be worked out.  Critically, introducing Javascript outside of the AMP library is a bit of a no-no as this typically slays performance – currently, this means no Ads (potentially a problem) and no Analytics (definitely a problem).

AMP may benefit your SEO. Watch this space…

Cool dudes who like playing with this cutting edge geeky stuff will dive right in –it might be a bit early for the rest of us, but AMP is definitely something to keep an eye on!  Most interestingly, Google suggests that “If your AMP-compliant pages include a few additional pieces of information, they can also benefit from special display features in Google Search results.”  Early previews suggest that this will take the form of a carousel type result which appears above the organic results, similar to the “Top Stories” seen on breaking news queries.

I'll post more information here when we have some concrete results for UK based businesses using AMP, so follow Noisy Little Monkey on Twitter for updates.