AMP URLs to Finally Remove the Google Prefix

Google is embarking on a new way for AMP, Accelerated Mobile Pages, are rendered that preserves the original URL.  This is a big deal as the current way that these optimized mobile pages are shown by URL introduces doubt for readers as to the original source.

First, in case you don’t know what Accelerated Mobile Pages are exactly, it is a caching system that Google uses to speed up the delivery of webpages to your mobile device.  Generally these are generated as google.com/amp/ then the site name or page.  The reason for this is due to privacy concerns of Google caching the originating URL

When we first launched AMP in Google Search we made a big trade-off: to achieve the user experience that users were telling us that they wanted, instant loading, we needed to start loading the page before the user clicked. As we detailed in a deep-dive blog post last year,  privacy reasons make it basically impossible to load the page from the publisher’s server. Publishers shouldn’t know what people are interested in until they actively go to their pages. Instead, AMP pages are loaded from the Google AMP Cache but with that behavior the URLs changed to include the google.com/amp/ URL prefix.

This trade-off has created concerns over the validity of the source information.

Google recognized this problem and has gotten a lot of feedback from sites about the challenge this redirected URL creates.  It would seem that a fix is on its way.  Google is going to be revamping the AMP cache and moving it to the new Web Packaging Standard.  This will allow users to get served up the accelerated page but will preserve the URL and keep the privacy concerns at bay.

The new change means that browsers will have to support the new Web Packaging Standard and that work is already underway for Chrome.  Hopefully other browsers will follow.

So what does all this really mean for you?  It means that if you go to any article on ClintonFitch.com on your mobile and are served up an AMP page, you will see the site’s URL, not google.com/amp/blahblahblah

By-the-by, if you want to know what any page on ClintonFitch.com looks as an Accelerated Mobile Page, just add /amp to the end of the URL.