eBay goes AMP, sign it might break out past news?

eBay adopting AMP for their transaction-based site may signal that Google might push out AMP well beyond article and news-oriented content.

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eBay announced they are now serving over eight million pages using AMP, Google’s accelerated mobile project initiative. This is the first major non-news site that has deployed AMP widely in a production setting.

eBay said deployed it for many product and category-based pages for mobile only. They even gave example URLs of the pages that support it, including this one and this one.

eBay said you can add the amp/ parameter to any browser URL when you are on the mobile site and you should see the AMP version. Here are examples of the URL:

Not AMP: https://m.ebay.com/sch/16GB-iPhone-5s-Smartphones/9355/bn_341667/i.html
AMP: https://m.ebay.com/sch/amp/16GB-iPhone-5s-Smartphones/9355/bn_341667/i.html

In late February, AMP went live in the top news stories box on mobile pages. In fact, the only way to show in the top news carousel on mobile is to have AMP available pages. Since then, AMP has expanded into the iOS app, recipes and the Google News apps.

Everyone expects Google to enable AMP promotion in more and more settings outside of news-oriented articles. So this is probably why eBay took the step to try deploying AMP for their transaction-based site.

Many webmasters and site owners have taken notice and should also consider looking into AMP to potentially leverage more traffic from Google and, of course, improve speed of their site for mobile users.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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