2017 SEO Trends: AMP and Redirects

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: it now links to AMP pages across all search results, which shows the project sits at the centre of the company's plans.

What does AMP actually do for us?

1.1 — 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 removes your pages' speed problem entirely.

Thanks to the open-source HTML and CSS it uses — and to the cache being hosted by Google rather than by your own server — AMP pages load up to 30 times faster.

That speed gives readers a genuinely better reading experience.

1.2 — The positive effect on rankings and CTR

According to John Shehata, AMP pages perform better both in rankings and in click-through rate.

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.

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

For more on AMP: AMPproject.org, AMPByExample.com, AMPproject.org/roadmap

2 — The 301 redirect

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

But Google recently announced that redirected pages do not lose their scores, and that you can comfortably use any kind of 3xx redirect without losing rankings.

Plenty of sites 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.)

Some of the SEO tools you can use for redirect work: DeepCrawl, Website Auditor

Feel free to ask me anything about AMP and redirects.