Google announced Accelerated Mobile Pages only last month, and now it has said that the new open source project will really make its mark early next year.
Similar to Facebook’s Instant Articles, the idea behind AMP is to make sure that webpages load quickly on mobile devices.
Vague details
Google did not give a specific date for the move but did say that it intends to share “more concrete specifics on timing very soon.”
With the company’s current high emphasis on the importance of mobile-friendly content, it seems likely that AMPs will benefit from a default ranking boost.
Google explained: “We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously.
“We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant – no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using,” the company added.
New open framework
There are more than 4,500 developers expressing interest in AMP, according to Google, and in excess of 250 contributions of new code, samples and other documentation have already been made. Further areas open to input are analytics and template features.
With mobile-friendliness already being an acknowledged ranking signal, it is easy to expect that the use of AMP will also be taken into account.
However, David Besbris, Vice President of Engineering, Google Search, and Richard Gingras, Head of News, Google, wrote in a blog post: “Ensuring that traffic to AMP articles is counted just like current web articles is also a major focus of the project.”
They added: “comScore, Adobe Analytics, Parse.ly and Chartbeat have all stated that they intend to provide analytics for AMP pages within their tools. They have since been joined by many others: Nielsen, ClickTale and Google Analytics. This development is significant for the AMP Project because publishers developing for AMP will not skip a beat in terms of analytics and measurement – analytics for AMP are real time and will work within your existing provider.”
