Whoa controversial title alert. I toned it down a bit from my original Google AMP F#@#@$g Sux opening, which upon reflection, I found wasn’t exactly professional when you are trying to attract business to your website. regardless this is an opinion piece and as always, I look forward to discussing the points raised with the community.
Why is it that the concept of actually owning your own content is becoming a luxury? Post something on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other social network and guess what, they make money from that. Lucky we can have our own web presence then?
Maybe not, the new magical seo factor for the last year has been Google AMP, a web standards mobile first dictatorship which inflicts a set of ideological nonsense onto web owners under the guise of standards all the while giving google the rights to cache your content and take ownership.
For what, better rankings in google’s search engine? Sorry google but I find this extremely disturbing on so many levels.
The AMP Project is an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all. The project enables the creation of websites and ads that are consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms.
Google’s way of owning the content you publish on your own systems. Due to the caching system used, Google AMP pages are in fact hosted by google themselves, the rights to which also assimilated into their backend including statistics and targeting. The url also appears to be a google.com address for the majority of websites.
This obviously this didn’t sit right with a lot of people so lets backtrack with a Google blog post titled Improving URLs for AMP pages:
TL;DR: We are making changes to how AMP works in platforms such as Google Search that will enable linked pages to appear under publishers’ URLs instead of the google.com/amp URL space while maintaining the performance and privacy benefits of AMP Cache serving.
No wonder Google have removed the Do no Evil Clause. So what was their solution?
Based on this web standard AMP navigations from Google Search can take advantage of privacy-preserving preloading and the performance of Google’s servers, while URLs remain as the publisher intended and the primary security context of the web, the origin, remains intact. We have built a prototype based on the Chrome Browser and an experimental version of Google Search to make sure it actually does deliver on both the desired UX and performance in real use cases. This step gives us confidence that we have a promising solution to this hard problem and that it will soon become the way that users will encounter AMP content on the web.
Essentially a simple redirect as nothing else has changed. To be fair I have no issue with the Amp goal of performance and good standards, I just have issue with specific terms dictated under the guise of this.
I am also looking forward to the renaming of AMP to something else even more obscure aka search console, google plus and google places.
Its not all doom and gloom though as you can actually make use of Google AMP and at the same time, not restrict your main web presence in doing so. For solutions like this feel free to give us a call or contact us directly at this website.