Google Search Now Shows AMP Labels For All

While almost everyone nowadays browses the web through their smartphones at one point or another, not all websites are still designed with mobile constraints in mind, leading to non-optimized, slow-loading content on smartphones. Google's AMP, short for Accelerated Mobile Pages, is an effort to encourage websites to pick up the slack, both using technologies and a little preferential treatment. The initiative has apparently been quite popular that Google is now stepping up the game to make AMP'ed pages even more prominent in Google Search on mobile, putting labels on websites that provide mobile-optimized content.

By just using standard web technologies, Google AMP has provided tools and guidelines to ensure that web pages will have versions that work normally on desktop but load and perform fast on mobile devices. That's something that works particularly well when loading a result from a Google search. However, all that is moot if users won't be able to tell at a glance which of those pages have been "accelerated" anyway.

Earlier this year, Google put those AMP'ed pages front and center, or rather, top and center, by placing them in the Top Stories section of mobile search results. This had the effect of encouraging web site creators to implement AMP on their pages in order to be one of the select few. But starting today, Google is expanding that to any and all AMP'ed pages, putting nifty labels on the search results.

Google promises that search results aren't modified or affected in anyway, which is always a concern when it comes to this types of "preferential treatment". All that's affected, Google says, is the user experience, where AMP'ed pages load less than a second.

SOURCE: Google