2017 SEO Trends: AMP and Redirects

Note (October 2026): I wrote this post in December 2016 to cover the SEO trends expected for 2017. Today AMP is no longer required to appear in Google's Top Stories carousel, and Google no longer shows the AMP badge in search results (Google's 2021 announcement).

Is Google AMP a passing fad or here to stay?

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a Google initiative for building user-friendly web pages for mobile visitors. AMP-compliant pages are built to load at high speed on every mobile device.

So is AMP another Google fashion that will come and go within a few months, like the ones before it? Or will it stick around and shape the future of mobile? Adam Greenberg highlighted an important point for Google: Google now links to AMP pages across all search results. Those links show the project sits at the centre of the company's plans.

What does AMP actually do for us?

AMP and user experience

We all know page load speed matters. If a web page takes longer than three seconds to load, up to 40% of visitors will abandon it.

AMP is designed to cut your pages' load time.

AMP pages use open-source HTML and CSS, and Google hosts the cache instead of your own server. As a result, AMP pages load up to 30 times faster.

That speed gives readers a better reading experience.

AMP's positive effect on rankings and click-through rate

According to John Shehata, AMP pages perform better both in rankings and in click-through rate. Update (October 2026): Google states that it applies the same standard to AMP pages as to all other pages.

Actionable tips:

Because AMP is a new Google initiative, we need to keep up with it. The easiest route for anyone who wants to use AMP is a WordPress site: a single plugin is enough to generate AMP pages.

1. The AMP WordPress plugin

Once the plugin is active, you can reach the AMP version of any article by adding /amp/ to the end of its URL.

2. Test it

Google does not start serving those pages to users the moment you switch to AMP. So after creating your AMP pages you need to validate them. You can use the Accelerated Mobile Pages section of Google Search Console (Search Appearance > Accelerated Mobile Pages) for that. Update (October 2026): In Search Console, the AMP status report now shows whether AMP pages are valid.

Alternatively, open your AMP page in Chrome and press Ctrl + Shift + I to reach the Console.

For more on AMP, see AMPproject.org, AMPByExample.com and AMPproject.org/roadmap (the project's current address is amp.dev).

The 301 redirect

Anyone who has worked in SEO for years has learned it the hard way: do not go overboard with redirects.

In 2016, however, Google announced that redirected pages do not lose their scores, and that you can comfortably use any kind of 3xx redirect without losing rankings. Update (October 2026): According to Google's redirects documentation, a permanent redirect (301, 308) is a signal that the target URL should be canonical. A temporary redirect (302, 307) does not carry that signal.

Sites can carry multiple pages with the same title and content. Cleaning those up with 3xx redirects will help. (Watch out for duplicate pages created by https and http versions, which I cover in my post on canonical tag best practices.)

Two of the SEO tools you can use for redirect work are DeepCrawl (now called Lumar) and Website Auditor.

Feel free to ask me anything about AMP and redirects.