Dive Brief:
- Google has changed how it handles URLs for AMP sites per a company blog post and as reported by TechCrunch to drive more traffic to publishers' sites.
- Publishers had expressed concern that Google was stealing mobile traffic by providing URL links for mobile search queries that pointed back to Google instead of the original publisher. The change allows mobile searchers to view, copy and share the publisher’s link rather than the AMP URL.
- The AMP project officially launched a year ago and by October was increasing mobile traffic for publishers with The Washington Post reporting a 23% increase in mobile search users who return within seven days while Slate seeing a 44% increase in monthly unique visitors and a 73% increase in visits per monthly unique visitor according to Google at the time.
Dive Insight:
Google’s AMP search shift came after complaints that mobile searcher were presented with three different URLs — the publishers, an AMP cache version and a Google AMP Viewer version. The user interface changes make it more clear where the original content is coming from and also makes it easier for users to share the URL from that publisher rather than the back-end AMP URL from Google.
The confusion about the different URLs may have been unfounded because the Google-based versions were all temporary redirects, but they did throw confusion into how the redirects were handled for publishers and end users alike.
Google continues to fine-tune AMP as more searching and content consumption takes place on mobile. Last week, Google announced that it has teamed up with Cloudflare to deliver verified ads more quickly than was previously possible on the platform.