Google tightens its grip on your content
Owen Williams covers off all the current problems with AMP, the main one being that Google are continuing to systematically taking more control over the content on the web.
By all means, make the web a faster place, but reward sites that are doing it on their own without using Google’s proprietary markup and servers to do so.
The sad thing about Owen’s article is that it is a silent call for people to take a stand against it, yet he knows that it is at the cost of traffic to your site. For Evan, and many other publishers, this stand which reduces traffic will also in turn reduce ad impressions and earnings.
But that is what taking a stand is all about, it’s never an easy thing to do or it wouldn’t be called taking a stand.
The overall AMP project launched with a focus on news publishers. They’re asked to create a second, lightweight version of their articles; these versions surface in Google Search and load relatively quickly on mobile devices. In return, Google raises the search-results ranking of pages that use AMP, providing an influx of free traffic. Google itself even hosts “approved” AMP pages for publishers accepted into Google News, circumventing publishers’ websites entirely unless users click through on a separate URL that appears at the top of a page. AMP adoption is also the only way to gain access to Google’s Discover feed, which features articles on the page that appears when you open a new tab in the Chrome browser, potentially driving hundreds of thousands of views if the algorithm chooses your content.
An excerpt from Google tightens its grip on your content
