A couple of months ago Google announced the Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) Project that provides a faster mobile web experience. To understand why Google might incorporate this into its ranking algorithm, let’s look at some of the major updates over the past 5 years.
Search Engine Algorithm Update Timeline
Google tests and adjusts its algorithm at least once a day, if not more. Below are some of the larger, well known updates geared towards Usability and User Intent:
2011
- Panda: Penalized websites with thin content, content farms, high number of ads versus content. Updates continue to this day.
2012
- Penguin: Penalized low quality websites that were over optimizing and spamming keywords on their websites. Updates are on-going.
- Page Layout: Updated their page layout algorithms to devalue sites with too much ad-space above the “fold”.
2013
- Hummingbird: Major algorithm update that shifted to semantic search (conversational search).
2014
- Pigeon: Updates to local search and moved their core search algorithm to be closer with local cues.
2015
- Mobile Update: In May of this year, Google rolled out mobile rankings algorithm that takes into account multiple ranking factors for mobile friendly.
With the number of searches conducted on mobile devices surpassing desktop earlier this year that this trend will continue. Something that is not lost on Google or Bing and they will be incorporating how quickly a page loads not just on desktop but mobile devices into their algorithms.
Increased Speed
With AMP comes increased speed in that it relies heavily on CSS, pre-rendering and heavy limitations on JavaScript. The AMP documentation also indicates the addition of enforcing best practices with CSS. By doing so the claim is there has been a performance improvement “between 15% and 85%”.
Conclusion
Based on the updates we know about from Google and how heavily the updates fall into Usability and User Intent, we will most likely see this included into the Page Speed Insights they currently provide which means at some point they will use the data as a ranking algorithm. Get up to speed (pun intended) on AMP HTML.
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