Google announces an important change in AMP accelerated mobile pages

During the AMP Conf 2019 conference held in Tokyo, Google announced a number of changes and new features regarding the AMP project, a fundamental change that raised a lot of skepticism. Starting today, AMP pages from Google search results will display the original URL in the address bar, which according to the American company should solve some confusion issues. This means that when you open any link from a mobile search on Google and you are directed to the AMP accelerated mobile page, you will notice that the link actually looks like the original as the AMP icon will not appear at the end of the link.

Publishers say that this will pose a problem for them, as many users delete that code to access the version of the site that shows more hidden elements on the accelerated page. Many users and visitors will think that websites that use this technology do not natively display other content such as the latest articles and lists that usually appear at the bottom of the mobile version of the site. However, the various add-ons that we use to activate this technology on websites appear at the bottom of the page with the phrase “Browse the office version” or “Browse the original version,” but a large percentage of visitors may not know about that.

The new update from Google further expanded these pages and made them take the place of the original pages, but 90 percent of the reactions that we monitored during the past hours on websites and Twitter were negative about this new amendment. Many major websites and newspapers use this technology in order to improve their position in Google search results on mobile, attract greater visits and reach a wide audience of readers and researchers. But these pages, on which ads can be displayed and greatly modified, do not provide many features found in the original mobile version, which is a problem for many publishers.

The new update will only work with Google Chrome for now, so switching browsers is a good solution. If you want to avoid being redirected by Google to these pages with misleading original links, switching to Firefox or Opera is the solution for the user.