Accelerated Mobile Pages Are Rolling Out Across Google

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Google Mobile

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) have been rumored to rollout in late February for some time, and it appears they are finally starting to appear. The AMP listings are being spotted in mobile search results, but it seems they are not available for all searchers.

Accelerated Mobile Pages are pages designed to be super lightweight and allow for incredibly fast load times. It does this by using a unique, streamlined version of HTML that is able to be heavily caches to provide the fastest loading experience possible.

To see if you have access to the new AMP search results, just perform a search on Google.com for any query that would typically trigger a news box. If you can’t think of anything, you can try ‘Trump’, ‘Google’, or ‘Obama’.

Barry Schwartz shared a few screencaps of what you can expect to see as the listings become more widely available. You can see them below:

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This screencap shows AMP listings appearing in the news listings, rather than the carousel:

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Google Has The Slowest Loading Mobile Home Page In Its Market

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Google has been vocal lately about encouraging webmasters to improve the loading speed of their websites, especially on mobile devices. It has made loading speed one of its many ranking signals and is rolling out Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to improve mobile website speed.

With all this effort to make mobile loading speed an important issue for webmaster, you might think Google would be ahead of the curve when it comes to making sure their pages load quickly on mobile devices. Not so, according to a recent test shared on Hacker News.

The test was conducted using Google’s own PageSpeed Insights tool and several others have replicated the results on their own. The findings seem clear; Google is the slowest loading home page on mobile in its market.

You can see the results of some of the speed tests below:

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Google’s loading speed

DuckDuckGo's loading speed

DuckDuckGo’s loading speed

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Bing’s loading speed

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Yahoo’s loading speed

Somewhat surprising, Yahoo came out ahead of the pack with a loading speed significantly faster than anyone else in the market. That may be part of the reason Yahoo has seen faster growth on mobile than Bing or other alternatives to Google. However, Yahoo’s market share of mobile search still sits at just over 3.5% compared to Google’s 94%.

Several elements are slowing down Google’s mobile home page, including render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content. Once AMP is rolled out, this could change. If Accelerated Mobile Pages are as effective as Google claims, it should have one of the fasted loading home pages on mobile once the new system is released. But, it is interesting that Google is currently lagging behind the field.

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Bing Shares Key Search Insights For Valentine’s Day

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Valentine’s Day is almost upon us, and that means searches related to the holiday are already starting to spike. Thankfully, you still have time to get campaigns running before Valentine’s Day searches peak.

Bing recently released data giving insight to key trends for Valentine’s Day-related searches (including gifts, candy, flowers, restaurants and jewelry), as well as ad performance to help inform your marketing efforts this year.

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According to the data, this week is likely already seeing an increase in searches compared to last week, but next week will be the height of Valentine’s Day fever. Desktop saw an especially notable spike in the final week before the big day, jumping 77 percent. In comparison, mobile searches rose by 71 percent.

In total, mobile made up 32 percent of Valentine’s Day-related searches and 17 percent of clicks across Bing last year.

The best day for Valentine’s Day-related searches was February 11 last year, but candy and chocolate searches didn’t reach their height until February 13.

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While many get an early start on larger purchases like jewelry, it isn’t a surprise that Valentine’s Day card shopping is often done last-minute. From February 12 through Valentine’s Day, cards sales skyrocketed, showing the need to customize your budget and bidding strategies depending on what products and services you provide.

Click-through rates saw their highest point overall between the February 10 and 14, averaging 4.9 percent. On desktop, CTR reached its peak in the afternoon of February 12, while mobile didn’t top out until late on Valentine’s Day.

For more data about Valentine’s Day search and keyword trends, check out Bing’s full presentation on Slideshare.

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Google Lets Users Try Out Apps Without Downloading

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Apps

While apps have become the hottest trend for smartphones, the market for apps can be incredibly competitive and hard to break through. Mobile users have limited space on their phone for apps, so they can be hesitant to try out new apps, especially if they are new or relatively-unknown. Even when users do download apps, they often only use it once and forget about it.

Now, Google has launched a new service to let users try out any app they want without having to use up their precious hard drive space. The company has launched a new streaming mobile ad feature that allows users to access a short 60-second or less version of the app that responds just like the full app.

Sissie Hsiao, Google’s head of product for mobile ads, says the goals of this new feature is to help app developers connect with the right users. In a statement to TechCrunch, she explained:

“You can buy ads, you can get apps installed. But a lot of apps are used once or they’re never used, even after they’re installed. We found that 1 in 4 apps is never even used, and there’s often this ‘try once’ experience, and then [the app is] never used again.”

The new streaming mobile ads, called “Trial Runs” allow users to try the app without downloading, which will hopefully help limit the number of “one and done” app downloads. Instead, it will motivate developers to focus on targeting a more refined audience who will be more likely to gully engage with the app.

The new feature is currently available to a limited number of testers, with no word of when to expect a full rollout.

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AdWords Announces Two New Features For The Holiday Shopping Season

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With the holiday shopping season kicking into high gear, Google is rolling out new features to help retailers maximize their sales. Google announced two new AdWords features this week aimed at helping businesses keep in contact with customers during the holiday shopping season, even when they are offline.

Subscribe To Text Updates

The first feature is a brand new ad unit that grants retailers the ability to send marketing messages straight to customer’s phones. The new unit allows users interested in being kept up to date with the latest specials and deals opt-in to text message updates when searching from their phones.

Users just have to tap the “Subscribe” button and they will be set to receive text messages from businesses through Google. Once subscribed, they will receive relevant updates and announcements, like limited time sales or special unique promotions.

To unsubscribe, customers can reply “STOP” at any time.

To protect user privacy, Google will not provide customer phone numbers directly to advertisers, and retailers will not have the ability to contact anyone directly. Instead, Google will act as the messenger, delivering any updates from businesses to consumers.

Holiday Structured Snippets

AdWords also announced a new extension to existing ad units to highlight holiday specific deals, called ‘holiday structured snippets.’ The new feature is specifically designed to promote holiday shopping deals specifically for Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

The new structured snippet acts the same as any other, and is accessible through a simple drop down menu which allows you to select either “Black Friday” or “Cyber Monday” as the header of an ad extension.

These snippets are unique for being able to promote a single offering for a specific holiday promotion, while standard structured snippets require at least three offers.

Google says Black Friday structured snippets will not begin appearing in search results until November, 20, running through November 27. Cyber Monday ads will be shown November 20, through November 30.

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Pinterest’s Buyable Pins Arrive On Android

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PinterestAfter months of anticipation, Pinterest’s Buyable Pins have finally come to Android. The long-awaited e-commerce feature was launched for iPhone and iPad users back in July, but the service only started rolling out for Android users last week.

The company also announced that it is launching “The Pinterest Shop,” which is a curated collection of Buyable Pins and products from retailers.

With Buyable Pins, Pinterest users are able to purchase items from retailers with just a few clicks and never have to leave the social bookmarking platform. It is a great time for Pinterest to be rolling out Buyable Pins to Android users, as the holiday season is starting to kick into gear.

Pinterest has reportedly been pleased with the success of Buyable Pins. The company said the number of Buyable Pins on the network had more than doubled to 60 million and that the feature was largely bringing in new customers.

Last month, the company expanded access to the service to three more major e-commerce platforms: Bigcommerce, Magento, and IBM commerce. These platforms are joining launch partners Shopify and Demandware.

The company says it plans to eventually allow businesses to promote Buyable Pins, but currently it is focused on featuring them organically in the home feed, category feeds, search results, recommendations, and Pin boards. It will also be promoting Buyable Pins in The Pinterest Shop, which the company describes as “a destination where you’ll find on trend collections of Buyable Pins and retailer shops, handpicked by us.”

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Google Issues Webmasters a Warning About Deceptive Mobile-Only Redirects

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While it is increasingly important for your site to be mobile-friendly, there are some unique risks to running a mobile-friendly site webmasters should be aware of. Google has been encouraging sites to implement mobile-friendly strategies, but it is also cracking down on mobile-only redirects if they are used for fraudulent or deceptive purposes.

Most of the time, mobile-only redirects are used to send mobile users to content they requested in a mobile-friendly format, however some use the redirects deceptively to direct smartphone traffic to unwanted content. In some cases these deceptive redirects can send smartphone users to entirely different websites than the one they requested.

The majority of webmasters aim to use redirects properly, but it has recently been found that deceptive redirects can find their ways onto websites without the webmaster ever knowing. This can potentially happen one of two ways:

  • Advertising: A malicious script installed to display ads may redirect mobile users to a different site without the webmasters knowledge.
  • Hacking: Some hackers set up redirects to spammy or malicious domains for mobile users only.

While it has become known that these redirects can be created without a webmaster’s awareness, Google has recently made it clear they will continue penalizing sites with these deceptive redirects. Google’s webmaster guidelines explicitly forbid these types of redirects and the search engine says it will enact manual penalties when they are discovered.

Thankfully, there is an incredibly easy test you can do right now to make sure your site hasn’t come down with a case of deceptive redirects. Just search for it in Google on your phone and click on the results.

Google also encourages webmasters to monitor their sites for user complaints as well as regularly reviewing analytics data for unusual activity such as any sudden drops in mobile traffic.

If you do find any evidence of deceptive mobile-only redirects, Google recommends checking Search Console for any warnings about site hacks. If you don’t see any alerts, it is possible there may be an issue with third-party scripts on your site. To figure out which one is causing problems, you will have to go through and disable them one at a time until the problem is resolved.

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Google Announces Over Half Of All Searches Are Coming From Mobile Devices

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Last week, during Recode’s Code/Mobile conference, Amit Singhal, senior vice president of Google Search, announced that over half of all searches conducted on Google each month are coming from mobile devices.

Mobile has quickly become a dominant force in search, but it has only overtaken desktop in both search and ad volume over the past year.

For this count, Google is not including mobile devices with screens over 6 inches in size, such as tablets. According to the company, Google is primarily counting mobile views as those coming from smartphones.

During his announcement, Singhal explained how the definition of search is changing as the way people interact with their devices and the internet evolves:

“Search as we think about it is fundamentally how you will interact with computing. Computing may live in a 4-to-6-inch device, it may live in a desktop, it may live on a 1-inch round device.”

The news was leaked by John Mueller on Google+ this week, while offering a warning to those who have yet to make their sites mobile-friendly:

“More than half of Google’s searches are now coming from mobile. If you haven’t made your site (or your client’s sites) mobile-friendly, you’re ignoring a lot of potential users. “

According to Search Engine Journal, Google also announced it has indexed over 100 billion links within apps, showing how Google is growing beyond the traditional idea of the web page.

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Google Puts An End To Large Mobile App Interstitial Ads

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Large overlay advertisements will likely be going out of style fast, as Google has announced app interstitial ads that cover a “significant amount of content” on your page will be considered not mobile-friendly and will not rank as well as mobile-friendly pages.

The change will go into effect on November 1, but Google’s mobile-friendly testing tools are already showing them as not mobile-friendly as of yesterday. In the announcement, Google wrote:

After November 1, mobile web pages that show an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page will no longer be considered mobile-friendly. This does not affect other types of interstitials. As an alternative to app install interstitials, browsers [should] provide ways to promote an app that are more user-friendly.

Here is an image to give you an idea of the kind of app interstitials that Google is attempting to do away with:

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Here is an example of the type of interstitials that will be considered mobile-friendly, according to Google:

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This means the native Apple-supported Smart Banners and Google Chrome-supported App Install Banners will continue to work just fine without causing any problems for your rankings, but the extra-large ones that cover up most or all of the page will no longer be mobile-friendly.

If you want to make sure your site is safe, be sure to test your pages that use app interstitials to ensure they pass the mobile-friendly test or the mobile usability test. Either of these tools will show you immediately if your pages have issues with app interstitials or other issues that may make your pages rank poorly on mobile searches.

Google said this only impacts app ads that block content like this while other ads not for apps will apparently remain unpunished. In the announcement, it said, “This does not affect other types of interstitials.”

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Study Shows Mobile-Friendly Sites Are Dominating Mobile Search Results Pages

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When Google rolled out its Mobile-Friendly Algorithm the results were initially underwhelming. Despite weeks of frightening articles about the so-called “Mobilepocalypse” or “Mobilegeddon”, the search results listings were largely the same in the immediate wake of the algorithm launch. However, a new study from Moovweb shows brands without mobile-friendly sites are starting to feel the pain.

The new study, which tracked clear visibility and ranking, shows consequences are beginning to affect sites who have yet to make their site easily usable for mobile searchers.

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Moovweb has been tracking “1,000 important e-commerce keywords in a range of industries” ever since the rollout of the Mobile-Friendly Algorithm on April 21 to see how the new algorithm is impacting mobile rankings on Google.

According to the study, top listings for search keywords were mobile-friendly 83 percent of the time, and 81 percent of the time the top three listings were. A review of the full page results showed 77 percent of page one results on Google mobile SERPs were mobile-friendly.

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The chart above shows the percentage of mobile-friendly sites in each of the top 10 positions across all keywords tested.

The company says mobile-friendliness in search results varied by vertical, with some industries being distinctly more mobile-friendly than others. Out of seven categories studied, retail had the most mobile-friendly results and transportation showed the lowest percentage of mobile-friendly results.

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It may have taken months, but the impact of Mobilegeddon is starting to become more obvious, but there is good news if you are starting to feel the pain. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Algorithm runs in real time, so you can make your site mobile-ready any time and expect to see fast results on mobile SERPs.

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