Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP for short)
Accelerated Mobile Pages are an open source project that Google is pushing very hard. Google has just said that they are going to be directing some of their search results toward AMP enabled sites.
So what is accelerated mobile pages? Well if you ask Google and most of the asleep webmasters they’ll tell you it’s open source code to enable blog webpages to load much faster on mobile devices than the current technology.
Well, if you bought that line, you bought into a 50% truth! Basically by stripping out code AMP does deliver webpages substantially faster. But, there’s a huge price that most small and medium-size webmasters are going to have to pay for that speed. If you compare an AMP delivered site within normal site on a mobile device you’ll see that the AMP enabled site does not show any of the links or right-hand side space that is usually devoted to some type of advertising to bring in some modest revenue to offset the webmasters time and expenses. So, what AMP is mainly doing is stripping out all the webmasters advertising and links, and just showing the content. Yes, also at the end of each post where I have related links to other post on my site and have tags for people who want the convenience to link my content to social media sites are gone on AMP enabled sites
Now wake up webmasters! To me, this is just a huge scheme by Google where they give the public something, in this case faster loading speed, but they force advertisers to use their Google ad words if they want to try to generate some modest income from their websites.
I’ve tested AMP on one of my sites and all my right side ads and links totally disappeared. So in essence while the page is going to load quicker, partly because there’s less content on the page and there’s no more ads or sidebar links. Also if you had a specific color theme or specific logo show up that’s gone as well. So while most may think this is a big move forward in technology, it’s actually the reverse. A lot of the code that displays custom colors and logos and and layouts for webpages was standardized many years ago. So what AMP does is go back and change that standard in the guise of providing faster loading times.
Sure webmasters are not given much of a choice, because if Google says they are going to be diverting search traffic to AMP enabled sites, if the webmasters don’t play along there’s a chance they could lose valuable traffic. But because the vast majority of webmasters gain their income from the advertising displayed on their sites AMP is going to make them disappear except for a couple of Google ad platforms and I’m not sure, I think there’s a couple of other ad platforms that may work.
So the big question is do you want to add a couple of plug-ins to your existing site to enable it for AMP in hopes of gaining more traffic? Keep in mind, even if you do get more traffic the real question is will you generate any more income? Unless you go with a Google ad platforms the answer here may be that you are just are being used by Google for your content and if you want to make any income you are forced into an ‘approved’ ad platform.
In conclusion I like to say if you have a WordPress site you don’t have to rewrite your code or use a special template to comply with AMP. If you are considering making your site AMP compliant, I’d suggest that you read up on this issue and then if you still want to proceed and you do have a WordPress site, I would advise downloading these two free plug-ins which are on the would main WordPress.org site:
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