eBay, Rakuten & Fandango sign up for Google’s AMP search results
A host of retailers have signed up for Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) programme after the search giant scrapped restrictions on placing such links within a carousel at the top of its search results to allow them to be placed in the full set of links listed on the body of the page.
Rakuten, eBay and Fandango are amongst a number of digital retailers to begin using the AMP format by making their mobile sites AMP friendly and whilst this alone will not improve their search rankings it does improve speed, loading an estimated four times faster and consuming just a tenth of the data of a regular mobile web page.
Explaining the change Dave Besbris, VP of engineering at Google said: "We see so many websites that aren't news publishers show up in the existing top stories carousel. We thought it was really important to deliver to these publishers who are trying to create AMP for a reason, so we thought we should show them in search when they are available."
Google claims that 90 per cent of AMP publishers experience higher click through rates after implementing the changes.