Google Featured Snippets Link to AMP URLs

Hooray!

Google now links to AMP URLs from Featured Snippets.

Most of the time.

If there’s an AMP URL available.

AMP isn’t a criteria for picking a Featured Snippet however.

Read what to do about it in this extract from TWIS SEO News & Updates 08 Sept 2017.

#SEO #SEONews #FeaturedSnippets #AMP #PageSpeed #GoogleAnalytics

Summary:

• In a small, but interesting update over the last week, Google has changed the Featured Snippet on mobile to link to the AMP variant URL where available.
• This doesn’t mean that AMP is a ranking factor for the Featured Snippet.
• At the moment, at least.

Actions to take:

1. AMP is not just for your news content any more.
2. You should also be including your standard article content as AMP pages.
3. If you are targeting Featured Snippets, in particular, you should be including AMP URLs.
4. Note that the AMP URL will show if your Featured Snippet was chosen anyway. Having an AMP URL will not change your chances of being a Featured Snippet.
5. If publishing via AMP URLs be aware of Google Analytics & AMP issues with double-counting and other challengess if AMP content is served from Google’s cache.
6. Click here to contact me to discuss implementing AMP and incorporating Featured Snippets as part of your content strategy..

Discussion:

Google really is all about speed. AMP is supposed to be about speed on mobile, before we all transition to Progressive Web Apps, but it is also more about the issues caused by so much advertising, some much JavaScript and just so much rubbish loaded onto pages.

I’m not a particular fan of Featured Snippets. I think they steal traffic from the publisher for Google’s benefit with little to nothing in return. I also think half the time they answer only half the question, so their utility is somewhat lacking.

Fortunately, if you have an AMP variant of your Featured Snippet page, you can now have that surface in SERPs and answer half the question in half the time.

I don’t think we’re a million miles away from AMP URLs receiving a small boost in SERPs, but there still needs to be a groundswell towards it from some very big publishers and other results pages.

More info:

• H/ T SE Land
• AMP Surfacing Globally
• Google Testing Featured Snippets

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I recently wrote about how Google’s Mobile First is Not Mobile Friendly. Read it now.

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• On mobile, if there’s an AMP URL available, Google will serve it to you in the Featured Snippet.
• You have to have the Featured Snippet first though.
• And still watch out for double-counting in Google Analytics.
• Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
• Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
• Finally, get your content ranking well on Google by starting to understand Find Crawl Index.

Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to implement them, please feel free to contact me.

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