Google Will Make it Easier to Share the Original URL on an AMP Site

Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages project has done great things for those who use their smartphone to search the web. As it is right now, when you do a web search with the Google application, some of those results can be optimized for this project. If they are, then tapping on the search result will bring up an incredibly optimized version of the article. This means it loads quicker, there tends the less ads, and it eats up less resources from your phone.

For those interested in learning more about it, be sure to check out our explanation of the technology here. The project hasn't been completely smooth since it has launched and Google has had to make numerous updates to it over the last few months. One thing of contention between Google and website owners has been the way Google handles the URL of the AMP article. There's been issues with Google using AMP links over application URLs, and the use of Google's own cache service for AMP articles.

Besides the possibility of your server being able to deliver the content faster than Google, there's also a problem when the reader wants to share the content. With this caching service, using the share functionality of the Google application actually shares the Google cache URL. This causes confusion for those who see the URL after it has been shared, and it just isn't the best way of handling things. This is especially true when Google tends to rank websites based on the number of links it has pushing to it (which is less of a factor now than it was before, but still).

Google realizes this is an issue and is changing the way the Google application shares these AMP links to the world. So instead of you tapping the share button and it actually sharing the Google cache link for the website, the application will soon use the original URL instead. This functionality is already active on the iOS version of the Google application, and will soon be coming to the Android version as well.

Source: Google Developers Blog

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