Mobile users have a want to load stuff on phones more easily and more instantly. Publishers too want that for their users, so the content is consumed and readers remain engaged. The biggies – Facebook, Twitter, Apple have understand this very well and everyone is coming up with their own solutions.
Facebook introduced Instant Articles, Twitter recently launched moments and Apple came up with Apple News to cater to content needs to mobile audience. Now, Google has jumped the same boat with AMP or Accelerated Mobile Page Project
AMP works its way out by publishers taking in content from a common library and tap into the Google cache, due to which it gets delivered on web pages quickly. Vox, The Verge, BuzzFeed and the Washington Post are already live with AMP pages.
Google’s AMP is different from Facebook’s instant article. The latter is sort of a walled garden, on the other hand, Google’s AMP project is open source and sharing can happen anywhere. Google’s AMP will essentially bring more engagement as users will have faster access to publishers content, whether it is through Twitter or Google search or Publisher’s own site.
On Google however there’s a special version that one have to use to see the AMP enabled pages. Most publishers will however publish both type of content, the regular one and the AMP enabled. Even WordPress has announced a plugin to publish in AMP format.
What we are worried about here is the terrible thing that would be having the same copy in two formats in the SEO perspective. One wont be able to generate more traffic to the main page when there’s another version to it. However, Google would try figuring out something in that aspect (probably canonical tag will help).
David Besbris, vice president of engineering at Google Search, said Google would not necessarily give higher search rankings to publishers who use AMP, but that speed of loading, as well as other elements like the quality of the publisher, would be taken into account when ranking publishers.
Facebook had also launched Instant Articles by roping in a few publishers in May. The company added more publishers to the stream last month to have articles loaded faster while on Facebook.
Even Apple’s iOS 9 which came out last month had Apple News, which has super fast news on the app. For Google, whose search platform depends on publisher’s content, this step was a must. People get frustrated when the content is slow in loading and this deviates the user.
AMP would help simplify the HTML code which will be of great help while displaying content on the mobile phones. The speed will be prioritized more than anything else. Content quality? Let’s wait and see.
