Google’s John Mueller Exposes His 2016 SEO Tips

In a Dec 15, 2015 Google+ hangout, at the 26:06 mark, John Mueller who is a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, was asked to share his SEO tips for the upcoming 2016. Here’s what he had to say:

Oh man… I don’t have any magical SEO tips for next year. I can’t tell you about that high rankings meta tag that we’ve been working on (strong sarcasm). But in general, I think next year you’ll probably hear a lot from us about AMP (more on that in a minute), mobile friendly, we’ve been doing over the years.

It is still a very big topic and we still see a lot of sites not doing that properly (talking about mobile-friendliness). Those are probably the bigger changes, but other things will definitely happen as well.

More information about JavaScript in sites so that we can really figure out how to handle these better in search and make a better recommendation on what you should do or shouldn’t do. But past that, of course, high quality content is something I’d focus on.

I see lots and lots of SEO blogs talking about user experience, which I think is a great thing to focus on as well. Because that essentially kind of focuses on what we are trying to look at as well. We want to rank content that is useful for them (Google Search users) and if your content is really useful for them, then we want to rank it.

Okay, nothing surprising here right? High quality content, great-looking and friendly user interface that looks great not only on desktop computers, but on mobile devices as well. But what is this AMP thing?

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and it is a technology created by Google, which is basically an open framework allowing website owners to build light-weight webpages that will, potentially, make the web even faster on mobile devices.

Yep, and Google is pushing hard to get it into the mainstream mobile-friendly pages development. So hard that they are implying that in the near future, pages created with AMP will get a ranking boost. Ergo the announcement made on Dec 10, 2015 that AMP pages will come to the SERPs as early as the end of February 2016:

Google will begin sending traffic to AMP pages in Google Search as early as late February, 2016.

Google’s Dave Besbris also confirmed this statement and I quote:

AMP is coming as soon as February to Google Search. We’re seeing lots of great momentum from the publisher and technology worlds. Let’s make the web faster.

So, it appears as though we might be on the verge of a new way of creating our mobile-friendly pages. So far responsiveness was the bomb, but it’s looking as though AMP might replace it in the near future. We’ll have to wait and see.