033: John Mueller On AMP Pages, Crawl Budget, Podcasting SEO

This week’s episode features John Mueller, one of only five Webmaster Trends Analysts at Google. Warning though: this episode also gets a little technical and nerdy.

But I wanted to create an episode for you all about AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). This was a really hot topic in the last week, with Google announcing future integration of AMP pages right in normal search results. So I figured, who better to talk to than … someone right from Google!

This episode can serve as an “everything you need to know” about AMP as a good jumping point. So when your boss, client, business partner etc say “hey, I heard about this AMP thing, what is it and should we do it?” you’ll be informed.

John and I also get into some peculiar issues around crawling and “crawl budget”, Podcasting SEO, dates in content and more! So for those of you that might already be up to date on AMP, you can skip ahead about 15 minutes to get to the “fun” stuff 🙂

Enjoy!

Don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes.

Links

• Webmaster Trends Analyst
• Google’s Rolling Out AMP
• Do Google Users Understand What AMP Means?
• Google to Expand AMP to Main Mobile Pages
• Search Console
• Googlebot Help
• Google Crawlers Help
• AMP Project
• Search Guidelines for AMP

People

• John Mueller

Agenda

John’s Background

• “I’ve been at Google for almost 9 years.”
• “They asked me if I wanted to come by and visit the office.”
• “As a kid we lived in Alabama and Texas.”
• Webmaster Trends Analysts
• “It’s a pretty small team.”
• “We’re doing SEO on the internal side.”

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

• What is AMP?
• “A lot of people make mobile websites in a way that is essentially a desktop website.”
• “Everything is much, much slower.”
• “It’s an open source project … all are welcome to join.”
• “AMP pages load extremely fast.”

Benefits of AMPs

• “The speed aspect makes a big difference with users.”
• “Conversion rates are usually influenced by faster load times.”
• Content Delivery Networks will be able to take a load off of the servers
• “AMPs are mobile friendly by default.”
• “You can have one site that features AMPs.”

How it works for a smaller site

• “The end project is moving more towards all kinds of content.”
• “Regarding more dynamic content, you may want to wait a bit to see how AMP evolves.”
• “To date, it works best with static content.”
• “AMP is on a per-page basis…you can mix and match.”
• “Think about what will make sense for the user (regarding interlinking, etc.)”

‘AMP’ or ‘AMP friendly’?

• “It’s probably just ‘AMP'”

Establishing AMP

• “Based on the feedback that we get, we’ll probably tweak things.”

How Analytics Work with AMP

• “There is an AMP analytics tag you can use.”

Will People Click on AMP results?

• “We did a lot of tests on how we should label the search results.”
• “There will be a period for people to get used to the AMP label.”

AMP and Click-through Rates

• “There have been studies to show that people click through more …”

Search Console

• AMP error report
• AMP and search analytics (queries, etc)
• “AMP is not a ranking factor.”

Crawling

• “Googlebot has a really good memory.”
• Crawl budget

Googlebot Video Crawling Podcasts?

• “There have been discussions to integrate podcasts better into search.”
• Have transcriptions made of podcast episodes?

Dates on Content

• “From a personal point of view, I love dates on content.”
• “From a search point of view, we do try to pull out a date and determine if it makes sense.”

How Many Emails Do You Get a Day

• “I get over ……. a week! “

Google Panda at Holiday Parties?