Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Will Stop Letting Sites Use AMP Format To Bait and Switch Readers (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the link-baiting dept.

"Google today announced a forthcoming update to its Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, web format that aims to discourage website owners from misusing the service," reports The Verge. "The company says that, starting in February 2018, AMP pages must contain content nearly identical to that of the standard page they're replicating." From the report: Currently, because AMP pages load faster and more clutter-free versions of a website, they naturally contain both fewer ads and less links to other portions of a site. That's led some site owners to publish two versions of a webpage: a standard page and an AMP-specific one that acts a teaser of sorts that directs users to the original. That original page, or canonical page in Google parlance, is by nature a slower loading page containing more ads and with a potentially lower bounce rate, which is the percentage of viewers who only view one page before leaving. Now, Google is cracking down on that behavior. "AMP was introduced to dramatically improve the performance of the web and deliver a fast, consistent content consumption experience," writes Ashish Mehta, an AMP product manager. "In keeping with this goal, we'll be enforcing the requirement of close parity between AMP and canonical page, for pages that wish to be shown in Google Search as AMPs."

2 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. The Death of AMP? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I hated AMP as soon as it arrived because you need to develop and maintain two completely separate websites basically, a horror show. And one of those websites -- AMP -- is completely non-standard.

    You can't even use server-side includes or an included CSS page, all the CSS has to be hard-coded into the head on the page.

    This is why many people wrote a smaller AMP "teaser" page that simply linked to the full HTML5 version.

    They're disallowing that tactic now and hopefully that will kill AMP once and for all. Who wants to maintain a hard-coded AMP website? And what about all the AMP "teaser" pages out there already, will they be disallowed?

    By the way, I never found any speed difference whatsoever between AMP pages and our regular HTML5 pages, despite all the server-side includes in the latter. If you write good, clean, validated code, rather than the garbage on most websites, you're fine.

    My feeling is that this new dictum will kill AMP for sure this time. If webmasters simply said "No" to AMP, it would die.

  2. Pot Kettle Black by RDW · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I really wish Google, apparently with the collusion of the websites, would stop shoving AMP down my throat in the first place. Since they helpfully nuked text reflow on zoom in the Android libraries, I've been using Opera as my main mobile browser because it fixes this. Except for AMP pages, where I'm stuck with their fixed format until I tap through to the original page. How about a 'load canonical page' setting in the google search options?