I think AMP is a trap

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is being heavily pushed by Google right now. I’m becoming more and more convinced that it’s a trap, and that unfortunately, we will all fall into it, whether we realize it or not.

The format for mobile pages known as AMP, Accelerated Mobile Pages, has all the hallmarks of Google’s more deceptive tactics to grab data from webmasters. If you’re not familiar with the format, it aims to create very fast mobile pages by heavily restricting what can be included on them. This can of course be very beneficial, and you can read more about it here. However, Google has a knack for slipping in some other agendas when they implement things, and that’s what we’re going to discuss today.

The Author Rank Debacle

Do you remember Author Rank? Google, along with the most naive and easily influenced SEO specialists, pushed hard for people to add Authorship to their articles. They simply linked all their works to their Google+ account, and in this way, Google knew who had written which article. For a brief period, you could be rewarded with a picture in the search results (which might come back). Google then insinuated that one should start using authorship to rank articles, and the easily influenced SEOs jumped on that little bit of information.

The result was that many webmasters began linking their content with Google’s, hoping to gain imaginary advantages in search results, but they never got those benefits. Google never implemented authorship as a ranking factor. In August 2014, Google killed the whole program. It might seem like a catastrophe for the development department in Mountain View, but Google had gained something of real value in the process: They obtained a ton of information about who owns which content and how these entities are interconnected.

Schema.org

Schema.org is perhaps the most prominent example of structured data. Strongly supported by Google, it works to increase the amount of structured data on the internet. The idea behind structured data is that it’s labeled data, using markup that tells a machine what is what on a page. You can specify what is a rating, which text snippet identifies the author, what ingredients are listed, and so on. This can certainly help search engines better understand content, benefiting us as searchers. However, it could also lead to something else.

If the search engine itself can understand what is important, what the “ingredients” are in the secret sauce of good content, it might choose to directly show just that in the search results, rather than letting the user click through to the page. For example, a search engine with less scruples could display Wikipedia’s information directly in the search results if it understands what the searcher is looking for. If it has learned a lot from access to this kind of data, it might also begin answering “What is” queries directly. Flights or hotel rooms could also be displayed right in the search results, allowing the search engine to grab revenue from comparison sites. And so on…

AMP

From the very start, AMP works in such a way that Google chooses not to send the visitor to your site. It serves a lightning-fast page, which is great for both you and the visitor, of course. The only price you pay is that the visitor stays with Google instead of being on your site. You can still persuade the visitor to move on to your site or convert, just like usual, but it’s a significant limitation. The question you have to ask yourself here is whether it’s better to have a few more (right now) visitors at the cost of no longer owning the visitor.

I will personally test it, of course. I will fall into the AMP trap, perhaps a bit more consciously than most others. I expect all healthy SEO specialists will do the same, because you need to know. It might even be that we go out with a recommendation to use AMP, but it will most likely come with a disclaimer. Unfortunately, it’s the case that it’s not enough to just resist. Google can run over the industry anyway. Not all hotel comparison sites shared their data with Google, but enough did for Google to be able to sweep the legs out from under all of them. The worst part about Google’s traps is that you almost have to fall into them, they are just that smart.

Maybe you don’t agree at all?