Google announced on their blog Tuesday that they will be displaying Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) into the organic search results for mobile search results. Currently, AMP appears in a top carousel called “Top Stories.” The “Top Stories” carousel mainly benefited news outlets and bloggers, but this new announcement seems to benefit all websites.
What this basically means is that content in search results will be labeled with the AMP lightning bolt logo, similar to the “mobile-friendly” tag.
According to their blog post, to date there are over 150 million AMP docs in their index and 4 million new docs are being added every week.
They also mentioned that this is NOT a ranking boost, however, with the added label displayed in the SERP, I think you could see an increase in organic traffic from mobile.
This year at SMX West, one of the major sessions at the conference was about AMP. Paul Shapiro (who we had on the podcast shortly after the conference, listen to our podcast here) spoke at that session, and below is his PowerPoint presentation from the event.
Google AMP for WordPress
If you have a website on WordPress, there is a great plugin for you to use. The plugin is called PageFrog and it will help you get started in making your Accelerated Mobile Pages for your website as well as setup Facebook Instant Articles (Facebook’s version of AMP). Click here to download the plugin. If that plugin doesn’t float your fancy, then give this AMP WordPress Plugin a try, as it is the official plugin from WordPress developer Automattic. Another great resource to have is this blog from Yoast.
What if I don’t have WordPress?
Have no fear, you can still add AMP to your website if you don’t have WordPress. I found this great tool from Postlight and it is free! Check out their tool here: https://mercury.postlight.com/. To learn more about AMP, visit their website at ampproject.org
