Google is getting serious about its Accelerated Mobile Pages project – a new format for building quick-to-load pages on mobile devices. While AMP has not fully rolled out yet, and there is some speculation about just how widely it will be adopted, Google has added an AMP section to its Search Console within Webmaster Tools. The addition of AMP into Webmaster Tools indicates that Google is getting serious about the project and predicts AMP will have a lot more staying power than past SEO phenomena that have fallen by the wayside.
In a nutshell, AMP loads a stripped down version of a page that can also be found on your desktop site. With AMP, web designers may choose to remove photos, videos, Javascript, or any other slow-t0-load content. By process of elimination, this means that AMP is a good fit for websites that contain a lot of text. On the flip side, AMP probably won’t be a great fit for wedding photography websites or any other websites for which photos are a necessity.
AMP will be a good fit for news and PR websites that contain a great deal of releases and other text-based content. If your website regularly pushes out content in the form of news articles or press releases, you may want to test out AMP pages for your site. The overall goal of AMP is to provide a seamless experience on a platform – mobile – that Google has been dedicating much of its SEO resources towards. News, PR and any other websites that choose to adopt AMP may enjoy a slight ratings boost, as well as a “Fast” or “Quick to Load” moniker next to their site in mobile SERPs. For now
For now, news and PR firms interested in adopting AMP should do their homework and understand that it is coming down the SEO pipeline as soon as February. For more info on AMP, check out one of Moz’s “Whiteboard Fridays” on the topic.