Google AMP coming to Organic Results

[Tay]

It's 2016 and it's hard to believe that browsing the web on a mobile phone can still feel so slow with users abandoning sites that just don't load quickly. To us — and many in the industry — it was clear that something needed to change. That was why we started working with the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, an open source initiative to improve the mobile web experience for everyone.

Less than six months ago, we started sending people to AMP pages in the “Top stories” section of the Google Search Results page on mobile phones. Since then, we’ve seen incredible global adoption of AMP that has gone beyond the news industry to include e-commerce, entertainment, travel, recipe sites and so on. To date we have more than 150 million AMP docs in our index, with over 4 million new ones being added every week. As a result, today we’re sharing an early preview of our expanded AMP support across the entire search results page --not just the “Top stories” section.

To clarify, this is not a ranking change for sites. As a result of the growth of AMP beyond publishers, we wanted to make it easier for people to access this faster experience. The preview shows an experience where web results that that have AMP versions are labeled with The AMP Logo. When you tap on these results, you will be directed to the corresponding AMP page within the AMP viewer.

Try it out for yourself on your mobile device by navigating to g.co/ampdemo. Once you’re in the demo, search for something like “french toast recipe” or music lyrics by your favorite artist to experience how AMP can provide a speedier reading experience on the mobile web. The “Who” page on AMPProject.org has a flavor of some of the sites already creating AMP content.

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. In addition, we want to give everyone who might be interested in “AMPing up” their content enough time to learn how to implement AMP and to see how their content appears in the demo. And beyond developing AMP pages, we invite everyone to get involved and contribute to the AMP Project.

Source: AMP your content - A Preview of AMP'ed results in Search
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IMO, this is going to be a disaster and rolled back eventually.

Another source: Google AMP is coming to organic search results

 

[Flex]

It will be interesting to see how things go. I've got a fairly large content site that we spent time converting to AMP pages (sep from existing non-amp urls). Overall it's been a learning process between styling, optimizing for conversions, etc.

 

[Tay]

Good follow up read on Google AMP: Google’s AMP Is Speeding Up the Web By Changing How It Works

Sites that follow these specifications to the letter will receive special treatment from Google. Starting this week, AMP-optimized new stories now appear at the top of Google’s mobile search results. That sounds great for publishers who have decided to build AMP sites, but there’s a big catch: if readers decide to share a link to an AMP page they’ve clicked on through a Google search, the link points to Google.com (for example, google.com/amp/yoursite.com/yourpage/amp), not to your site. A Google spokesperson confirms that there isn’t a way to both have your AMP-optimized appear in Google’s prioritized search listings without having that content hosted on Google’s AMP Cache servers.

That’s a big change in how the Google search engine works. Historically, Google has acted as an index that points people away from Google to other websites. With its AMP search results, Google is amassing content on its own servers and keeping readers on Google.

In that sense, Google’s use of AMP is similar to Facebook’s Instant Articles service, to which it’s often compared. Facebook Instant Articles gives publishers the option of embedding their content on Facebook’s servers, so that users can read an article without ever leaving the Facebook mobile app. Unlike Instant Articles, however, sites that follow the AMP standard can also be embedded on other sites as well. Twitter and Pinterest, for example, are expected to begin using AMP to embed pages on their sites or mobile apps in the near future.​

 

[Tay]

Regarding AMP AD Landing Pages: AMP Ad Landing Pages (ALP) aims to speed up the page load time after the ad click

Here are the four things ALP does:

• Pre-connects to landing page: Normal ads do not typically know the URL of the actual landing page. Ads leading to ALPs always know it, and thus can issue a pre-connect request to the respective landing page, which reduces the time it takes to navigate the user to the landing page after the user clicks.
• Pre-fetches landing pages: Simple non-CPU-intensive resources that are visible on the first viewport of the landing page are requested and downloaded before the user clicks on the ad.
• Delivers Google Cache URL when available: As a trafficker, when you input a canonical destination URL for a creative, the ad server can switch it to the AMP version of the URL (with trafficker consent) using the AMP URL API. The ad server can also embed code required by the creative to pre-fetch and pre-connect to the landing page. Ad servers like DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) are integrating such features over the next couple of quarters to make trafficking of AMP landing pages easy.
• Zero Redirects: When possible, AMP eliminates redirects to the ad server. So what happens with the redirects? AMP will initiate the requests once the user has reached the landing page. AMP also supports the amp-pixel component for third-party tracking redirects which can be performed on the landing page.

Here is an animated GIF showing how fast the experience will be when you use AMP Ad Landing Pages:

Here are the technical instructions to implement these ALPs.
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[Ryuzaki]

AMP and Instant Articles are thinly veiled attempts at controlling the "energy" of the industry without producing any content themselves, which is what Google and Facebook have done all along.

Just like Uber the biggest taxi company in the world that owns no taxis and Airbnb the biggest real estate rental company that owns no real estate... it's genius level meta-ownership through enabling those without the means to play the game... but you have to play on THEIR field. It's also on the order of metaphysical elder gods harvesting energy for personal gain like psychic vampires.

I see it as similar to Wordpress. It allowed non-tech people to make websites. Themes allowed people to choose designs. Plugins to change functionality. All without any knowledge of what's actually going on.

AMP and Instant Articles is the same thing but for Speed Optimization and installing Display Ads.

The only difference is Wordpress gives you 100% control. AMP and Instant Articles are only asking for everything. They want your HTML markup, your content, your images, your backlinks even... all while dangling a couple of dollars on a fish hook in front of your face.

Adding AMP to the organic searches is just like them adding Authorship to Google+. In the end, that bribe wasn't enough. And they rolled it back.

I don't see this as gaining mass adoption nor improving the SERPs. If the top 10 results don't use AMP but 11-20 do, are they intending on showing worse results in a carousel on top just in hopes to get a shitty CTR on Adsense several steps away from the SERPs instead of slapping additional Adwords ads on there? It's moronic every which way you look at it. It's just a power grab on some Orwellian style control system.

 

[CCarter]

None of it makes sense. I'm seeing quotes from Googlers that "AMP is NOT a ranking factor". So their story is if you are on mobile it's better for your users to see the AMP version of your website in the organic rankings - a stripped down version of your website. Why would I do that? Why would I want to serve a stripped down version of my website if I have a choice of an AMP version versus my regular site? I don't see the advantage according to THEIR story.

I figure at some point they'll have to concede that AMP is a ranking factor, since they themselves prefer to serve the AMP version of my site versus the regular version. That's the only way it makes sense for me to waste time creating an AMP versions of my site - it's a ranking factor I can leverage over my competition. If it's not and I'm already going to be #1, #5 or whatever - I'd just rather serve my regular site instead of the restricted AMP version where users cannot really navigate the result of my site correctly or have the user experience I WANT for MY USERS.

Is Google AMP a ranking signal?

No.

Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, stated during his SEJ Summit Chicago appearance that, “Currently, AMP is not a mobile ranking factor.”

But of course you can pull that “Currently” apart as much as you like, and read into it a high likelihood that Google will probably use it as a direct ranking factor one day soon.

Source: Is Google AMP a ranking signal?​

 

[Ryuzaki]

They'll make it a ranking factor for a while as another bribe to get the techies to adopt it, just like Google+ was. It won't be enough, because it fundamentally only helps AND hurts Google. For all the brains they have developing this stuff, their marketing team doesn't seem to be the sharpest tools in the shed.

 

[andreint]

Our internal testing is showing a nice SERP bump and slightly better CR on AMP versions of high-traffic pages.

Google is sucking up our AMP pages really fast - within 30-40 days of going live, some of these sites now get 60-70% of TOTAL traffic from /amp/ URLs.

 

[luxer]

Nothing to say, other than hopefully it fails like Google +

 

[CCarter]

AMP's starting to show signs of weakness.

• Lack of mass adoption (outside the SEO community)
• Limiting user experience
• Shared links are to Google AMP urls not the original page
• Overall BAD idea

Now Google is now working on a way for searchers to disable AMP! That's always a bad sign:

All our discussion has been around Google AMP is how to enable it, how to benefit from it and the results - which are sometimes poor. We also did touch on Google's response on how searchers can or cannot disable AMP. But for a while now, publishers have been asking, how do they disable AMP.

There are stories of publishers trying to remove AMP and then Google still tries to show the AMP URLs, leading to 503 and 404 errors when someone clicks through from Google to the site.

So Google is trying to work up a solution for publishers to disable AMP, when they are not happy with the results - which is actually a growing issue for Google.

After months of silence from Google in this massive Google Webmaster Help thread about disabling AMP, which started over 6 months ago, Tomo from Google gave some hints on how this will work.

He basically said, they are trying to enable an canonical set up, like you have with href lang, or mobile sites and so forth, so that Google can pick up on the changes faster. He wrote "the Search team is working on creating a direct path from AMP pages on Google Search to the canonical URL as specified by the publisher (usually the non-AMP original URL)." "Sharing will also use the canonical URL where technically possible," Tomo added.

This would technical allow publishers to disable AMP safely for the purpose of Google search picking up on those changes.

Tomo also addressed how searchers may be able to disable it. He said, "additionally, the top bar scrolls away on Android and the Google Search App for iOS devices and it will soon on iOS Chrome and Safari too. The team is currently hard at work to make this happen."

Sauce: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-disable-amp-23099.html
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You can't even remove it without 404 errors popping up! Jesus.

I never liked AMP - the philosophical implications it has of letting Google host your website, stripe down it's content, and keep the traffic on their website. I'll never implement AMP on any website project I'm apart of, but just like I suspected, AMP is starting to show signs of coming to an early grave. It might be 3-4 years until it goes the way of Google+. I honestly felt it was disrespectful to the webmasters and website owners - the ones who's content powers Google so Google's users can get great content. It's a dangerous road to go down when you start creating closed gardens.

 

[CCarter]

I can’t believe this AMP nonsense is still around. 95% of the time I can’t scroll when I am on a page and realized it’s an AMP page. Ridiculous.

 

[maximus]

Fwiw I have one services related site that im running amp on.
based on the analytics 70% of the inquires come from the amp version of the contact form.

its a pain in the ass to setup and tweak but I think it’s simplicity in layout and speed can be appealing to some users.