Google Search Console is the webmaster tool that helps you track how your website is doing, so you can fix problems for better SEO. You can view and manage all the data related to your website, but recently, Google added a link to a new guide that focuses on creating AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) pages. You can find this guide on the Google Search Console.
Since Google introduced AMP on September 28th, the link to the AMP page experience guide has been placed in the Google Search Console. This is most likely a positive step forward, since it means that Google is taking the AMP effort more seriously. However, since AMP is still in its early stages—and because of the confusion over what it really is—it is hard to see a great benefit to this change.
Google Search Console now refers site owners to additional resources if they want to address AMP page performance issues.Starting today, Search Console will show links to the AMP page guide in areas where site owners might find it useful.
For example, a link to the guide is displayed when URLs are examined in the Page Experience and Core Web Vitals reports.
Clicking on the link will open the AMP Page Experience Guide report, which helps troubleshoot issues related to the recent Google Page Experience update.
The AMP User Guide contains additional optimizations recommended to ensure an optimal user experience.
Ultimately, this integration will make it easier for site owners to take action on performance issues reported in Search Console.
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As Naina Risinghani of The AMP Project noted in a blog post, AMP strives to meet all best practices, but this is difficult to achieve in a single system:
As page usability signals go mainstream, AMP project members around the world are working to ensure that website owners get the best possible performance when creating AMP pages. However, like many other frameworks, AMP cannot implement all web development best practices.
To get the best possible user experience on your AMP pages, we strongly recommend that all website owners implement the additional optimizations recommended in the AMP page experience guide.
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The AMP page guidelines were first published last year and are continually updated to reflect practical lessons learned from analyzing the effectiveness of AMP pages.
An example of a recent addition to the guide are guidelines for downloading custom fonts to help site owners optimize LCP and CLS.
If you are not familiar with the AMP page guide, here is a summary of the most important details.
What is the AMP page experience guide?
The AMP Page Experience Guide is a tool developed by the AMP project that analyzes URLs based on Google’s page experience criteria.
It then provides feedback based on its analysis to help website owners improve the quality of AMP pages.
The tool is specific to AMP, which means it can make recommendations that don’t apply to non-AMP pages.
Since it is specific to AMP, it will not work with normal HTML pages. If the tool detects that the URL is not an AMP page, the user is redirected to the PageSpeed Insights page.
The AMP Page Experience Guide uses publicly available APIs like Google PageSpeed Insights, Safe Browsing, and Mobile-friendliness Test to analyze the page experience.
Since there is no public API to check for intrusive interstitials, website owners are advised to check the ad experience report manually.
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The tool also uses an open-source API called AMP Linter to analyze URLs to find AMP-specific opportunities to improve page performance.
This integration with Search Console will help more site owners make the necessary improvements to take advantage of Google’s new ranking signal.
Since it’s not part of Google’s official toolkit, the AMP page experience guide may not have come to the attention of every website owner.
However, it’s clear that Google is greenlighting this tool, as evidenced by the direct link in Search Console.