Accelerated Mobile Pages to go Live in Feb

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is said to roll out live to mobile search results February 2016. So, with only a month to prepare let's look at what, if anything, you should be doing.

AMP: What is it?

As we mentioned a few months back the AMP project is completely open source and has been designed to make really fast website pages for Google to quickly be able to serve users on a mobile device. It's simply a stripped down version of your existing web page that will eventually be hosted entirely by Google.

• Your pages cannot have Forms
• No Javascript will be allowed
• Images will only load when you scroll down to them
• A stream-lined version of your CSS is required
• No interstitials will show up.

However, according to Google, your analytical data will still be available as well as your ads. It's been called Diet HTML. You can view a demo of AMP within Google's search results here g.co/ampdemo on any mobile device you want.

The pages that have a valid AMP version will be served within the mobile results as a clickable carousel above the rest of the content. That means that by creating AMP pages you're playing right into Google's obsession with fast loading pages. To quote Google:

“The way we think about it is, speed is one of those critical ranking factors, not the only one that you need, and AMP says to us, basically, ‘I’m consistently fast,"

AMP: Who actually needs it?

Google's John Mueller is telling users to think before taking the time to create AMP pages. Right now it mostly benefits publishers (and that's not just news sites). So, if publishing content is NOT a major part of your business plan then you can wait for the dust to settle before pushing forward. However, if your users are coming to your site primarily to view your content (and that includes recipes) then this is something you need think about moving forward with.

AMP: How to make it happen?

A...