AMP Is Stealing Mobile Traffic?
Welcome back Rankers! I found a few comments on my show last week that I wanted to discuss. Now if you remember, last week I covered three SEO things you should be looking at before the New Year. One of those things was AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages. Now the AMP project is not just Google, it’s other organisations as well. Some of the comments revolved around not using AMP as many people have been complaining about it. This may be true as there are reports of Google stealing your mobile traffic. I did a report on this around a year ago, when Google first announced it. They are only allowing certain ad types on AMP, and certainly the Wall Street Journal is complaining about that today. There was also a Search Engine Land article about some publishers doing really well out of AMP while others have not been fairing so well.
Google Theft?
One particularly good article by Alex, explains that people never actually get to your site. What he means by that is that if you go to AMP you will see how lightning fast it is. What Alex’s issue is, is that even though in my example the address says ‘amp.smh.com.au’ you can click on the address bar and see that we are still actually in Google. What Alex is saying here, quite legitimately, and that I said twelve months ago, is that I can’t get to that Sydney Morning Herald article. Every time I try, it simply takes me back to Google search. So Alex is saying that Google is stealing your traffic. AMP certainly has its issues. The Search Engine Land article states that some publishers are seeing positive results from AMP. Google wants AMP feedback.
I find it helps if you place a link at the top of every AMP page that takes people directly to the original site. If you find there’s a problem with that, let me know. Certainly it’s a tactic being used by some of the major publishers.
Lose The Mobile Pop-ups
There is also an issue with pop-up ads, or subscription ads. This is an area where many publishers are building their lists, making money, selling e-books, and those sorts of things. Unfortunately you are not going to be able to do that in AMP. It’s a two-fold reason. One is that mark-up doesn’t allow it. The bigger reason is that Google is going to start punishing sites that have mobile pop-ups come January. So by that reasoning, they are certainly not going to allow it in their AMP platform. If those publishers are complaining today that their pop-ups no longer work in AMP, they are going to have much larger issues come January, unless you have transitioned away from that for mobile users. If you require further information on that, go back and check out the show I did on that on Mobile Interstitials.
You will see that there is a format that Google will probably allow but they haven’t specified. They are most likely the sorts of pop-ups that you see iOS display in search, or in AMP type search, the banners that you see across the top. They will probably be okay, although Google has not yet specifically said that. Forget about complaining about interstitials and pop-ups with AMP, because you’re never going to see them. Also make sure that you have a link, like the Sydney Morning Herald, at the top of all your AMP pages so that readers can easily access your site.
Hopefully that’s helpful. Yes, you still have to do AMP. And yes, maybe Google is trying to steal your traffic. Look at it this way, rich snippets and featured answers, if you get one of those, even though you don’t have to leave the search environment, sites that get those rankings or positions, their traffic goes through the roof. It’s better than a number one spot. It’s better than being number one for a single phrase because featured answers and the like will rank you for a whole lot more phrases. It also results in a lot more traffic to your site, so people don’t just stay at Google, they do go to the destination site. So make it easy for them to do that. See you all next week. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
