WebProNews

Tag: Accelerated Mobile Pages

  • Google Wants to Bring Fast-Loading AMP Technology to the Entire Web

    Google Wants to Bring Fast-Loading AMP Technology to the Entire Web

    Google has been trying to relieve publisher concerns over its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology. On Thursday, the company announced that it wants to make the technology available to the entire web by turning it into an industry standard.

    By using Google’s AMP, websites load quicker on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. However, AMP uses a nonstandard web technology from Google’s domain wherein published articles resides on the company’s servers. This means that web addresses link only to Google, robbing publishers of site visits and potential ad earnings.

    On the upside, articles posted on AMP are prominently featured on Google’s Top Stories “carousel” in the mobile search results, giving publishers the spotlight.

    Google also wants to help drive traffic to non-AMP websites by featuring them in its carousel, but on one condition: these sites must have speed benefits similar to that of AMP’s. Faster site loading times are primarily traced to AMP’s nonstandard technologies, such as Web Packaging, Feature Policy, and Paint Timing, among others. In simpler terms, Web Packaging is like a compressed file for web content while Feature Policy is useful in switching off particular browser features. Among the long list of features, the AMP team underscored the importance of Web Packaging technology in allowing pages to load offline.

    “Based on what we learned from AMP, we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more instant-loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this, like the Top Stories carousel,” AMP Project tech lead Malte Ubl said.

    “This content will need to follow a set of future web standards and meet a set of objective performance and user experience criteria to be eligible,” Ubl further expressed in a blog post on Thursday.

    Though Google seems committed to using AMP to improve the web, It wasn’t able to give a clear-cut timeline for implementing the changes it proposed. For now, the tech giant is simply encouraging publishers to continue utilizing AMP.

    “Meanwhile, AMP will be Google’s well-lit path to creating great user experiences on the web. It will be just one of many choices, but it will be the one we recommend,” Ubl wrote.

  • All Websites Should be Using AMP

    All Websites Should be Using AMP

    John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google in Switzerland, confirmed what everybody is thinking, Google and the AMP Team ultimately intends for almost all sites to display AMP versions for mobile devices. “If you ask the AMP team, they will tell you that all websites should be using AMP, “Mueller said in replying to a question from a Hangout participant. “So to some extent, I can see that making sense. It’s definitively one way to make really fast websites, or websites that load almost instantly.”

    “If you’ve been holding off because you’re saying, well, my website doesn’t need this, then maybe it makes sense to take a look again and see what it does now,” Mueller said. “So at the moment, we only show it for the kind of in the news, carousel on top, the top stories and that’s something where I expected to kind of expand to other parts of the search results as well.”

    Meuller was also asked about the recent news about eBay adopting AMP, “I think with the eBay one, even though it was an AMP, they couldn’t add to cart, or something like that,” responded Mueller. “They didn’t have that functionality on the site.”

    “There’s definitely some things that don’t work so well with AMP at the moment,” says Meuller. “But it’s an open source project, so I think people from eBay are active there as well, making new components and that’s something that I expect to evolve over time.” The Webmaster Trends Analyst added, “I am really happy that someone like eBay is taking the time to do these kind of experiments, because even if they’re not showing in search yet, we can’t get there without people actively trying things that kind of go past what’s possible now.”

    “I imagine if someone like eBay can get it to work for their site, which is really dynamic, which requires a lot of interaction, then that’s something that’ll be possible for a lot of other sites as well,” concluded Meuller.

    Check out the discussion in the Google Hangout video below:

    Ebay clearly believes that AMP is for more than just publishers and thinks it would be great for all kinds of websites and especially for ecommerce. “The speed aspect was very critical for us, and we wanted to do more for speed,” stated Senthil Padmanabhan, Principal Web Engineer at eBay. “That is when we ran into AMP.”

    The AMP project was announced around the same time we started the initial brainstorming for browse. It seemed to resonate a lot with our own thinking on how we wanted to render the new experience. Although AMP was more tuned towards publisher-based content, it was still an open source project built using the open web. Also, a portion of the traffic to the new browse experience is going to be from search engines, which made it more promising to look into AMP. So we quickly pinged the AMP folks at Google and discussed the idea of building an AMP version for the browse experience, in addition to the normal mobile web pages. They were very supportive of it. This positive reaction encouraged us to start looking into AMP technology for the eCommerce world and in parallel develop an AMP version of browse.

    Today we are proud to announce that the AMP version of the new browse experience is live, and about 8 million AMP-based browse nodes are available in production. Check out some of the popular queries in a mobile browser — Camera Drones and Sony PlayStation, for example. Basically adding amp/ to the path of any browse URL will render an AMP version (for example, non-AMP, AMP). We have not linked all of them from our regular (non-AMP) pages yet. This step is waiting on few pending tasks to be completed. For now, we have enabled this new browse experience only in mobile web. In the next couple of weeks, the desktop web experience will also be launched.

    “We are excited to partner with Google and everyone else participating on the AMP Project to close the gap in launching a full-fledged eCommerce experience in AMP,” says Padmanabhan. “We have created a combined working group to tackle the gap, and we will be looking into these items and more.” The items Padmanabhan is referring to include smart buttons, input elements, advanced tracking and A/B testing. “With items like these in place, AMP for eCommerce will soon start surfacing.”

    “We will also be looking into creating a seamless transition from the AMP view to a regular page view, similar to what the Washington Post did using Service Workers.” Padmanabhan added. “This will enable users to have a complete and delightful eBay experience without switching contexts.”

    “We are on our path to making eBay the world’s first place to shop and this is a step towards it,” concluded Padmanabhan.

  • Google Offers Office Hours for AMP Help in 8 New Languages

    Google Offers Office Hours for AMP Help in 8 New Languages

    Google has been holding a number of AMP office hours hangouts to help publishers better understand how to implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on their sites and deal with the various issues and scenarios that come along with that.

    Google began sending search traffic to AMP pages last month, and will likely only increasingly point users to these pages when applicable as time goes on. AMP isn’t a direct ranking signal yet, but it could be in the future. Google is already exclusively showing AMP content in news carousel results on mobile.

    Over the next couple of weeks, Google will roll out a new series of office hours in the following languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and Indonesian.

    The hangouts will feature product managers, technical managers, and engineers from Google, who will speak in these languages and answer questions accordingly.

    There’s a schedule of the planned office hours here.

    As reported earlier, Google has been working with Lullabot to create a Drupal 8 module that supports AMP, and the beta version is now available. They’re also working on one for Drupal 7.

    Image via Google

  • Google On AMP As a Ranking Signal

    Google On AMP As a Ranking Signal

    Google has been talking up Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for months, promising a February launch date for when it would start sending search traffic from Google results to pages using it. Many are no doubt wondering if utilizing AMP will give them a ranking boost. Well, Google addressed that.

    Have you set up AMP for your site yet? How was the experience? Discuss.

    Earlier this week, Google began showing AMP results in search results. In fact, this came a day earlier than expected and earlier than when Google actually made the announcement. We posted about it prior to the announcement, but let’s take a moment and look at what Google has said since then.

    The announcement came on Wednesday. Google said:

    In just over four months, AMP has come a long way, with hundreds of publishers, scores of technology companies and ad-tech businesses all taking part in this joint mission to improve the mobile web for everyone. And starting today, we’ll make it easy to find AMP webpages in relevant mobile search results, giving you a lightning-fast reading experience for top stories.

    Now when you search for a story or topic on Google from a mobile device, webpages created using AMP will appear when relevant in the Top Stories section of the search results page. Any story you choose to read will load blazingly fast—and it’s easy to scroll through the article without it taking forever to load or jumping all around as you read. It’s also easy to quickly flip through the search results just by swiping from one full-page AMP story to the next.

    According to the company, pages built with AMP load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than equivalent non-AMP pages.

    The company didn’t mention AMP as a ranking signal in the announcement. Word around the industry was that Google would likely make it one. At launch, however, it is not. Still, that doesn’t mean it won’t become one.

    During a recent webmaster hangout, Google’s John Mueller was asked about this. Here is what he said (via Search Engine Roundtable):

    AMP a ranking signal…At the moment, it’s not a ranking signal. So it’s obviously one way to make mobile friendly pages, so that might be an option where I’ve already seen some sites where they’ve moved their whole website to the AMP format, and obviously that’s a mobile-friendly set-up, so that kind of gets that mobile-friendly boost, but just AMP itself is not something that we have as a ranking signal at the moment.

    Mobile-friendly was of course announced as a ranking signal roughly a year ago. Even if AMP isn’t directly a ranking signal on its own, it will naturally put you on the path of another ranking signal.

    In fact, stands to reason that it will help you out beyond just mobile-friendly, but also with page speed, which Google announced as a ranking signal quite some time ago.

    This week, WordPress.com sites began supporting AMP automatically, and there’s a new plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites. From the WordPress.org plugin directory:

    With the plugin active, all posts on your site will have dynamically generated AMP-compatible versions, accessible by appending /amp/ to the end your post URLs. For example, if your post URL is http://example.com/2016/01/01/amp-on/, you can access the AMP version at http://example.com/2016/01/01/amp-on/amp/. If you do not have pretty permalinks enabled, you can do the same thing by appending ?amp=1, i.e. http://example.com/2016/01/01/amp-on/?amp=1

    Note #1: that Pages and archives are not currently supported.

    Note #2: this plugin only creates AMP content but does not automatically display it to your users when they visit from a mobile device. That is handled by AMP consumers such as Google Search.

    You can find an FAQ page for AMP here.

    Do you intend to support AMP with your site? Do you already? Let us know in the comments.

    Image via Google/AMP

  • Google Announces AMP In Search Results

    Google Announces AMP In Search Results

    As reported on Tuesday, some users were already seeing AMP results in Google mobile search results, but there was no official announcement.

    A previous report from Ad Age indicated that the launch would come on Wednesday, and Wednesday indeed, Google made the official announcement:

    In just over four months, AMP has come a long way, with hundreds of publishers, scores of technology companies and ad-tech businesses all taking part in this joint mission to improve the mobile web for everyone. And starting today, we’ll make it easy to find AMP webpages in relevant mobile search results, giving you a lightning-fast reading experience for top stories.

    Now when you search for a story or topic on Google from a mobile device, webpages created using AMP will appear when relevant in the Top Stories section of the search results page. Any story you choose to read will load blazingly fast—and it’s easy to scroll through the article without it taking forever to load or jumping all around as you read. It’s also easy to quickly flip through the search results just by swiping from one full-page AMP story to the next.

    According to the company, pages built with AMP load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than equivalent non-AMP pages.

    As speed has been a ranking factor for some time, it stands to reason that using AMP will benefit you for SEO purposes.

    Images via Google

  • Google Sends Search Console Messages About AMP

    Google Sends Search Console Messages About AMP

    Google is starting to send some publishers messages about AMP in Search Console.

    G-Squared Interactive digital marketing consultant Glenn Gabe shared a screenshot on Twitter (via Search Engine Roundtable) showing what it looks like. It tells publishers:

    Google has detected that news content on your site might benefit from enhanced exposure on Google Search if you implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)…

    Google will begin sending search traffic to AMP pages next month.

    Earlier this week, Google announced Google Analytics support for AMP and that AMP will support most ad-serving scenarios at launch.

    Image via Google

  • Google Adds Google Analytics Support for AMP

    Google Adds Google Analytics Support for AMP

    While this was always intended to be part of the whole thing, Google just announced Google Analytics support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which the search engine will start sending traffic to next month.

    Earlier this week, Google said AMP will support most ad-serving scenarios you’re likely to use, so that’s helpful too.

    In a post on the Google Analytics blog, Google writes:

    “Today, the AMP team announced the launch of an analytics component that will enable measurement on AMP pages. The Google Analytics team is committed to helping our users measure their content wherever it appears. So, for publishers looking to use AMP to provide an improved user experience, we’ve released Google Analytics measurement capabilities for Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP support in Google Analytics makes it easy to identify your best content and optimize your user experience.”

    “Analytics on AMP is handled by an open source, reusable component that the Google Analytics team helped build. The <amp-analytics> component can be configured with Google Analytics specific configuration parameters to record pageviews, events, and even custom dimensions. That configuration works hand in hand with a global event listener that automatically detects triggers like button presses. As a result, there’s no need to scatter custom JavaScript throughout your page to detect actions that should trigger events and hits. Instead, you can define which actions should trigger hits within the configuration section and let the magic of AMP do the rest.”

    Google says you should use a separate Google Analytics property to measure your AMP pages, which could be a bit of an inconvenience (my words, not theirs), but as they note, AMP is still a new technology, so give it time.

    You can read more about AMP and analytics in a new post on the AMP blog.

    Image via Google

  • Good News About Google’s Big Upcoming Change

    Good News About Google’s Big Upcoming Change

    A lot of webmasters and publishers are gearing up for Google’s big Accelerated Mobile Pages launch next month. Sometime in late February, Google will begin sending search traffic to AMP pages.

    A lot of publishers are no doubt interested in how using AMP will impact ads on their pages. This is, after all, how most are making their money. The good news is that chances are, you’ll be good to go when Google launches.

    Have you been working on getting AMP implemented? Do you expect to in the near future? Let us know in the comments.

    With an IAB conference taking place, Google has been talking about this a bit this week. The company says its goals for AMP, as the project pertains to advertising, are to ensure that it works well with the publisher business models of today and that it leaves plenty of room for innovation in the future.

    “In the near term, our top priority is making sure that ad formats, features and measurement that publishers rely on work within the AMP environment,” says a post on the AMP blog. “When AMP launches on Google Search in February, it will include important, basic functionalities. These include the ability to traffic ads with ad servers of your choice, support for multiple demand sources and formats (including native ads), full control over ads placements, and viewability measurement. It also includes integration with 20+ ad tech vendors, all of whom are excited to participate in the AMP initiative.”

    The post shares comments from executives from Moat, Kargo, Outbrain, and The Daily Mail.

    “Everyone involved in this effort recognizes that it will take time and innovation to transform the ads experience on the mobile web,” the post says. “We’re invested for the long term. As we look to the future, four key principles are guiding our development work on ads in AMP.”

    These are: “Faster is better,” “‘Beautiful’ matters,” “Be safe, be secure,” and “We’re better together”. The first three of those are self-explanatory. The last refers to the project as being an industry-wide initiative.

    Google has said before that the initial roadmap for ads includes faster ads, ads that can resize, and support for viewability, as well as integration with certain data management providers and sponsored content providers.

    Richard Gingras, Head of News at Google, recently said that publishers and ad tech partners are working in parallel to implement and test new capabilities.

    “Buyers have also been engaged: Annalect (Omnicom Media Group) is currently reviewing the project and excited about what AMP is trying to accomplish for users and advertising,” he said. “Advertising companies that have expressed their intention to support AMP include: Outbrain, AOL, Taboola, OpenX, DoubleClick, AdSense, Pubmatic, Integral Ad Science, Moat, Smart AdServer, Krux, Polar, Nativo and Teads.tv.”

    Jonathan Meltzler, head of platforms and publisher marketing at Google talks about AMP and ads more on the DoubleClick Publisher blog.

    Google recently announced that it was updating the documentation for AMP, adding new documents about AMP creation and testing components to go along with existing docs about monetization and analytics.

    Many sites are going to be rushing to get AMP implemented as Google begins sending traffic to pages next month. A ranking boost is possible as Google obviously likes fast pages and continues to focus on improving the mobile experience.

    Are you planning on taking advantage of AMP? Do you see legitimate reasons not to? Discuss.

    Image via AMP

  • Google Invites You To Try AMP Features in Search Console

    Google Invites You To Try AMP Features in Search Console

    Google recently said that it will start sending search traffic to Accelerated Mobile Pages sometime in late February. Just ahead of the holidays, Google was found to already be showing AMP-related errors in Search Console to some users.

    This week, Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller posted on Google+ asking if you’re interested in trying out AMP features in Search Console (via Search Engine Roundtable).

    “If your game this year includes working on Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), especially if you’ve already implemented AMP for a site, and you’re keen on giving us feedback on new features, you might want to sign up as a beta-tester,” he wrote.

    There’s an application form to do so here.

    The form says, “At Google, we’re constantly working on improving Web-Search as well as our tools, documentation, and services for publishers. We’ve found that it’s really helpful to get input from users as we try things out. If you’d like to join as a tester, feel free to sign up here. We’ll get in touch with you as we start working on projects that you might find interesting.”

    Up front, you’re asked to give your name, company, role, email address, Search Console email address, country, and language(s) before proceeding to three more pages of stuff to fill out.

    You can learn more about AMP here. It’s likely to be one of the biggest changes to Google search this year.

    Image via John Mueller (Google+)

  • The Next Big Phase of Google Search Is Coming In February

    The Next Big Phase of Google Search Is Coming In February

    In October, Google announced Accelerated Mobile Pages, a new open source project, which is basically its answer to Facebook’s Instant Articles. Like Instant Articles, the purpose of the project is to enable web pages to load more quickly on mobile devices.

    Do you think Accelerated Mobile Pages are the best way forward for mobile search results? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    The project utilizes a new open framework called AMP HTML, which is built on existing web technologies, and is aimed at letting websites build light-weight pages.

    Last month, the company announced that it would begin sending traffic to AMP pages in Google search beginning early next year. In a new update, Google says this will begin happening as early as late February. There was still no specific date given, but that’s a little more definite than what we got before.

    The project was always bigger than Google itself. Others on board from the beginning include Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, WordPress.com, ChartBeat, Parse.ly, and Adobe Analytics, which will all integrate AMP HTML Pages.

    According to the project’s website, Twitter will begin experimenting with linking to AMP content provided by publishers early next year, as will LinkedIn. Pinterest is already testing pages in their iOS and Android apps. Pinterest, by the way, found that the pages load four times faster and use eight times less data than traditional mobile-optimized pages.

    Messaging apps LINE, Viber, and Tango have also joined the effort, and will link to AMP content early next year.

    “CMS and analytics providers are critical players in the AMP ecosystem and have stepped up with fantastic support for the initiative,” says Richard Gingras, Head of News at Google. “WordPress will support all publishers that wish to enable AMP pages beginning in January. From the world of analytics, comScore, Chartbeat, Google Analytics, and Parse.ly will have AMP support in their tools by late February.”

    “The initial roadmap for ads includes faster ads, ads that can resize, and support for viewability; as well as integration with certain data management providers, and sponsored content providers,” he says. “While these new capabilities are being implemented in AMP, publishers and ad tech partners are working in parallel to implement and test them. Buyers have also been engaged: Annalect (Omnicom Media Group) is currently reviewing the project and excited about what AMP is trying to accomplish for users and advertising. Advertising companies that have expressed their intention to support AMP include: Outbrain, AOL, Taboola, OpenX, DoubleClick, AdSense, Pubmatic, Integral Ad Science, Moat, Smart AdServer, Krux, Polar, Nativo and Teads.tv.”

    They are also in the process of implementing a richer analytics framework. The initial functionality for this will be available this month. Preliminary end-to-end testing for publishers and analytics providers will also begin this month. Full testing, Gingras says, will happen next month.

    He had this to say about content format innovation:

    New components and enhancements to existing ones continue to be designed and added to AMP. Highlights include amp-iframe, which now has resizing capability, and amp-click-to-play to enable a rich experience within an iframe once a user interaction has occurred. We now havetemplates to dynamically fetch fresh content, inspired by the need to support onward journey experiences. What’s more, several technology partners have contributed new code to AMP: Brightcove has submitted the amp-brightcovecomponent to enable a Brightcove Video Cloud or Perform player to be displayed and Vine has built an amp-vine component to display a Vine embed. Several more initial format components have been prioritized and are being tracked on Github.

    As far as search engine ranking goes, Danny Sullivan said in a tweet last month that AMP pages won’t rank better because they’re AMP, but noted that Google already rewards speedy pages, so they can still benefit.

    However, a new report from Sullivan’s Search Engine Land site (this one from Greg Sterling) says:

    From the event, two important tidbits: AMP pages may get a ranking boost and perhaps a “fast” label designation, similar to how Google shows labels for mobile-friendly pages. Both points are speculative however.

    Google discussed mobile page speed as an existing ranking factor (there’s debate about how much of a factor). Since AMP improves load time and page speed, publishers that have AMP pages will likely be prioritized in search results. Google didn’t confirm this explicitly but reiterated the importance of page speed. AMP is likely to be the most accessible way to improve page load times.

    Google has already made mobile-friendliness a ranking signal, and the whole point of AMPs is to make for a better mobile experience. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which AMPs aren’t benefiting in rankings.

    What do you think about the AMP initiative? Share your thoughts in the comments.

  • The Next Big Phase of Google Search Is Coming Early Next Year

    The Next Big Phase of Google Search Is Coming Early Next Year

    Last month, Google announced Accelerated Mobile Pages, a new open source project, which is basically its answer to Facebook’s Instant Articles. Like Instant Articles, the purpose of the project is to enable web pages to load more quickly on mobile devices.

    Google announced on Tuesday that it will begin sending traffic to AMP pages in Google search beginning early next year. They didn’t give a specific date, but said they intend to share “more concrete specifics on timing very soon.” Stay tuned for that. It remains to be seen whether or not these pages will get a ranking boost by default, but given Google’s emphasis on the mobile experience, it seems very likely that AMPs will benefit.

    Are you planning to implement Accelerated Mobile Pages? Let us know in the comments.

    “We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously,” Google explained when the project was announced. “We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant—no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using.”

    The program utilizes a new open framework called AMP HTML, which is built on existing web technologies, and is aimed at letting websites build light-weight pages.

    As far as ranking goes, Danny Sullivan said in a tweet last month that AMP pages won’t rank better because they’re AMP, but noted that Google already rewards speedy pages, so they can still benefit.

    Google has already made mobile-friendliness a ranking signal, and the whole point of AMPs is to make for a better mobile experience. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which AMPs aren’t benefiting in rankings.

    “Thousands of publishers have expressed interest in AMP since the preview launched with the likes of the BBC, Sankei, New York Times, News Corp, Washington Post and more,” write David Besbris (Vice President of Engineering, Google Search) and Richard Gingras (Head of News, Google) in a blog post. “Since then, many others have committed their support to the project, including R7.com and NZN Group in Brazil; CBS Interactive, AOL, Thrillist, Slate, International Business Times/Newsweek, Al Jazeera America and The Next Web in the US; El Universal and Milenio in Mexico; The Globe and Mail and Postmedia in Canada, as well as many more across the globe. The Local Media Consortium (LMC), a partnership of 70+ media companies collectively representing 1,600 local newspapers and television stations, has also voiced their support.”

    The two also announced that Outbrain, AOL, OpenX, DoubleCLick, and AdSense are working within the project’s framework to improve the ad experience for users, publishers, and advertisers. More information on this will come in the near future, they say.

    “Ensuring that traffic to AMP articles is counted just like current web articles is also a major focus of the project,” they write. “comScore, Adobe Analytics, Parse.ly and Chartbeat have all stated that they intend to provide analytics for AMP pages within their tools. They have since been joined by many others: Nielsen, ClickTale and Google Analytics. This development is significant for the AMP Project because publishers developing for AMP will not skip a beat in terms of analytics and measurement — analytics for AMP are real time and will work within your existing provider.”

    According to Google, there are over 4,500 developers expressing interest in AMP with over 250 contributions of new code, samples, and documentation having been made. Discussions are also underway related to analytics and template features.

    With Google Search the mobile experience has been they key narrative throughout 2015, and it looks like that will continue throughout next year, largely driven by AMP.

    Has this development been on your radar thus far? What do you think of the project? Discuss.

    Image via Google/AMPProject.org