Google launched AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for news stories in its mobile search results six months ago, and now it is ready to push the project forward. The search giant is now moving it beyond news by making it available to other mobile sites also.
AMP is popular among non-news sites
Similar to the rollout of AMP pages for news sites, the search giant revealed a demo site on Tuesday that allows you to feel the experience and gives developers a chance to improve AMP support for their sites before the feature is rolled out publicly.
Rudy Galfi, product manager for the AMP team, told TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois that they believe the product is now “ready for more” after a successful run for news sites. There are already more than 150 million AMP documents (with more than 4 million being added weekly) from over 650,000 domains in Google’s index.
Even though AMP initially focused on news sites, the format can work well for other types of content, and even though such pages are not easily available to users, many non-news sites are also adopting the format, says Galfi. But still, Google’s team is working to better support other forms of content, for example, e-commerce sites.
In June, Google helped eBay get AMP support on its mobile pages. The new demo site includes AMP pages from names such as TripAdvisor, Instructables, Reddit, Food Network, Disney, Genius, Drugs.com, NFL, Squarespace, Flipkart and others. Thus, one search for “card tricks” on the demo site could bring up a few instant-loading results like Instructables carrying the standard AMP lightning bolt symbol. The same is true for recipes, lyrics and other content.
AMP won’t affect pages’ rankings on Google
Presently, non-AMP pages take four times longer to load than the average AMP page, while the median load time for an AMP page is less than one second, and it consumes ten times less data than conventional pages. Most mobile sites currently are overloaded with slow-loading ads. Though AMP also has support for ads, ads on AMP pages load much faster and do not disturb a user’s browsing experience.
In the past, Google has said that better load times and page speeds are good for rankings, but as of now, they do not affect rankings, meaning that having AMP pages should not alter a page’s ranking on search results pages, stressed Galfi. However, Google has said it will favor AMP content in the case of identical AMP and mobile-friendly pages.
Since AMP lowers the load time significantly, one could assume that going forward, AMP content will help in the same way Mobilegeddon benefited mobile-friendly sites with improved visibility. One should expect AMP support for non-news sites in Google’s mobile search results to roll out publicly in the coming months, a Google spokesperson told Lardinois, but there is no information on a clear timeframe yet.
“We’re starting with a preview to get feedback from users, developers and sites so that we can create a better Search experience when we make this feature more broadly available later this year,” Google said in a blog post.
