Are Accelerated Mobile Pages stealing your mobile traffic?

Last week I talked about things to pay attention to before the new year, and AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, was one of them. We’ve see reports of multiple people complaining about AMP, specifically about AMP stealing their traffic results. AMP is only allowing certain ad types on mobile sites, which already curtails the possible revenue from a site, but it seems that they have written the search programs so that your readers can see your content, but never actually reach your site.

When readers don’t reach your site, your impressions numbers go down, and that has a big influence on your Google rankings. Here’s the way it works. Go to AMP just to see how lightning fast it is. Impressive, no doubt about it. But when you use AMP to view a site, you can click on the address bar to see where you are. Instead of on your site, the readers will still be in Google. They can’t actually get to your site – they just view it through a lens at AMP. In other words, it can be said that AMP is stealing your traffic.

Solutions? One thing you should do right away is to add a link to the top of every AMP page that leads directly to your original site. Some of the major players are doing this with great success. I’m curious to see how it works for the average e-commerce user, so let me know what happens on your site.

Another problem that’s appearing in AMP has to do with mobile pop-ups. I know they’re a great way to increase your mailing list and to increase your readership, but you can’t put them on AMP pages. First, their mark-up doesn’t allow it. Secondly, Google is going to start punishing pages with pop-ups, starting in January. Banner ads across the top may work, but that’s something you’re going to have to experiment with.

For more information, visit the StewArt website.

Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business StewArt Media has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne.