Google States Mobile Page Speed Will be a Ranking Indicator

We Are a Google Partner Specializing in Search Marketing, Mobile, and Display.
We Are a Google Partner Specializing in Search Marketing,, Mobile, and Display.

Well that cat is finally out of the bag! Google has stated that in July they will now be using the mobile page speed of your website as a mobile index ranking indicator.

This is very important news. Google had already moved to using just the mobile index for determining the organic ranking for all platforms and no longer had a separately ranked desktop index. The announcement released on Wednesday January 17th goes even further.

Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.

The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.

The key takeaway on this announcement is that page speed is important to Google and should be an important factor in the selection of any new WordPress theme or website design or web design platform.

Page speed will not be going away and site owners need to really start a review and efforts to address their slow loading websites.

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How to Use AMP on Your Blog for Google Part Two

We Are a Google Partner Specializing in Search Marketing
We Are a Google Partner Specializing in Search Marketing and Now Mobile Too.

Continued from Monday.

Once you use AMP on WordPress, and if you want to use AMP pages on your regular HTML site, you’ll need to do a little research. There are lots of sites and information from Google on how to set up and how to validate your new AMP pages.

This is what I have learned in the process of working on my own website pages.

The original and new AMP page need to be pointed to each other. The AMP page points to the original page using a canonical reference telling Google that the non-AMP page is the original. The non-AMP page then points to the AMP page so that Google can discover it using a special meta tag amp reference.

There are specialized AMP image references and specialized CSS references. Additionally, Google will require that the viewport be set in the page head section to validate the page.

It is not complicated to set up these static AMP pages, but it is complicated to get them to validate. That being said, the future for Google is all about AMP and mobile. With a little effort you can make your blog and website more attractive for Google to index (and cache) in this new “Mobile First” world.

Visit our website to find out more about our services and how we can help you be more visible on Google.

 

How to Use AMP on Your Blog for Google Part One

Man having an idea!
Mobile has shaken the world of search.

Use AMP or Accelerated Mobile Page for Google on your WordPress blog or WordPress website and you may just see your organic placement improve.

In the world of Google content is King and pagespeed is Queen. Google is really pushing implementation of AMP pages as they will cache them and deliver them to mobile devices instantly.

So how can you get in on this action and AMP up your site?

I use two plugins to create AMP pages for my blog and I manually hard code AMP pages for my PHP website.

For WordPress use these two together to get the best results.

Yoast SEO
Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP

I’ve found that validation of AMP is still quirky and questionable even with these plugins, meaning you will still see errors in the Google Search Console when you implement this, but the technology is getting better over time.

AMP pages will be striped down versions and nearly only text or in some cases, typically when you hard code them, use images that are responsive based on device.

Google is even testing AdWords and AMP as a beta right now and taking names for early implementation.

Check back on Wednesday for more information about AMP and your website.