What Is a Google Accelerated Mobile Page?

Innovation and speed are two cornerstones of Google – and now the giant has made another development that favors speedy results in the endeavor of search.

An Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP for short) is a newly designed type of mobile page that is optimized for speed and is tailored for certain purposes that could make or break existing mobile sites. Right now, Google has only rolled out AMP for for search in the news box, but it’s believed to expand and at that point, could become a ranking signal for websites.

Similarly to the “Mobilegeddon” of April 2015, mobile websites that aren’t compliant with the new design may drop off in authority over time. Even websites that are currently mobile-friendly could be seen as performing more slowly than AMP’s.

The feature was launched late February 2016 and is essentially a “diet” version of a webpage – by simplifying code, CSS and Javascript, sites can load much more quickly on a mobile device.

Richard Gingras is the Senior Director of News and Social products at Google. He told Advertising Age that “AMP takes speed to a point of extreme, so, obviously we look to leverage that. Again, it is only one signal. AMP doesn’t mean adopt AMP and get a massive boost in search ranking. That is not the case. All of the other signals need to be satisfied as well. But without question speed matters. If we had two articles that from a signaling perspective scored the same in all other characteristics but for speed, then yes we will give an emphasis to the one with speed because that is what users find compelling.”

Google is constantly changing up the rules of what performs best in search. Is your website mobile-friendly and does it pass the speed test? If not, your business might be adversely effected by the search engine page results. Get your site audited for free on our site here, or contact a member of the Absolute team today to start putting together your new web marketing strategy!