What is AMP?

The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) is an online publishing format, created by Google. Main reason for creating AMP is increasing page load speed in mobile devices. Median load time for AMP-coded content is 0.7 seconds in comparison, the median load time for non-AMP pages is 22 seconds.

AMP is created as a competitor to Facebook’s Instant Articles, that is similar to HTML and optimized for mobile web browsing. Using special code, AMP-HTML is intended to help webpages load rapidly when clicked in the Google search results pages, though results have varied. It has tons of rules and restriction you can read about them in ampproject documentation.

Put simply, AMP is a way to build web pages for static content (pages that don’t change based on user behavior), that allows the pages to load (and pre-render in Google search) much faster than regular page loading. And technically AMP pages do not use external resources except images or videos (which only will be loaded when visitor scrolls to them), and all CSS & JavaScript codes must be inlined in HTML content of the page. These modifications plus this fact that Google caches indexed AMP pages and sends visitors from Google search result to Google cached pages, makes AMP pages to load more faster.

What does AMP mean for SEO?

AMP is not directly a search engine ranking factor, and sites that adopt AMP won’t “get a massive boost in search ranking,” according to Richard Gingras, senior director of news and social products at Google.

However, “speed matters” in search engine ranking. If we had two articles that from a signaling perspective scored the same in all other characteristics but for speed, then yes, Google will give an emphasis to the one with speed because that is what users find compelling.

AMP can also indirectly influence where Google places pages in search results. If an AMP gets more clicks and fewer bounces, because it’s faster to load, Google determines that the page is valuable to users, and it’s likely to get higher placement in search results.

Consider another example, let’s imagine there are 3 different sites serving the same topic, and only one of the sites is serving an AMP version of that content. In cases like this, it appears that the AMP version would be above the regular results.

But What About Ads?

JavaScript is mostly forbidden on AMP sites. This made it impossible to publish Ads on AMP pages at first it lunched but don’t worry now, you have Publisher and its plugins! Publisher with Better Ads & Better AMP plugins, are fully armed to display Ads in different Ad Locations in AMP pages.

Where AMP Pages are Stored?

First when Google redirects you from search results to target page, it’s a cached version of the page but if you click in whatever internal (or external) link in the page, you will redirect to the source website. Don’t worry about SEO, Better AMP enables both Google Analytics Code and Canonical address to the source website for this cached page on Google servers, so no credit is lost (it’s not fully known how Google reacts to canonical rel).

The true mechanisms of updating AMP caches are not fully known, Google prefer to keep them secret because of probable abuses.

Also remember this, when you are using Better AMP plugin, after entering an AMP page from Google, by clicking every internal link you will continue to see AMP pages unless you click on View Desktop Version button. AMP pages are light weighted and fewer codes execute on device browser, these reasons help to improve user experience.

Google AMP Cache Updates

Read more about Google AMP cache updates in Google developer blog.

Update AMP Content

Read more about Update AMP content in Google developer blog.