Google May Be Stealing Your Mobile Traffic
I run my blog on WordPress with a custom theme. 6 month ago I’ve added support for Accelerate Mobile Pages (AMP) in order to provide better user for mobile devices. I did not research the AMP project well and have made some costly false assumptions that I wanted to share.
Most importantly, I was surprised to find out that instead of redirecting users to an optimized version hosted on my server, Google was actually serving a snapshot of the page from their own cache. To make things worse, Google was injecting a large toolbar at the top of the snapshot encouraging users to get back to Google search results (a functionality already provided by the back button) and making it harder to get to the original site.
To draw a contrast, Google have been keeping snapshots of sites for a very long time, available via a â€"cache†link right next to search results. The cache link, however, was optional. Clicking on the search result, traditionally, would take the user to the original source. With AMP, Google have turned this equation around.
I do believe that Accelerated Mobile Pages is a great project! At the same time, I find the way Google handles redirects slightly dishonest and very concerning.
Read More at:
https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-...obile-traffic/
Most importantly, I was surprised to find out that instead of redirecting users to an optimized version hosted on my server, Google was actually serving a snapshot of the page from their own cache. To make things worse, Google was injecting a large toolbar at the top of the snapshot encouraging users to get back to Google search results (a functionality already provided by the back button) and making it harder to get to the original site.
To draw a contrast, Google have been keeping snapshots of sites for a very long time, available via a â€"cache†link right next to search results. The cache link, however, was optional. Clicking on the search result, traditionally, would take the user to the original source. With AMP, Google have turned this equation around.
I do believe that Accelerated Mobile Pages is a great project! At the same time, I find the way Google handles redirects slightly dishonest and very concerning.
Read More at:
https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-...obile-traffic/
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