One of the frustrations for publishers with AMP has been their own domains won’t display in the URLs when people click on AMP results from Google Search. Google has been busying working on a fix for months, and there is some good news! A preview was posted on Tuesday for developers to interact with its solution to the AMP URL problem using Chrome version 71 or higher.
Rather than Google showing the Google cache AMP URL after users click on the search result, Google will display the publisher’s URL.
Below is a GIF of how this will work on Chrome 71 or greater on mobile when clicking on an AMP result in Google search:
This was demonstrated by Google at Google I/O earlier this year.
Google laid out these steps:
- Using a technology called Signed HTTP Exchanges cached AMP URLs are transformed to the publisher domain on any AMP Cache. It is currently only enabled in Chrome version 71 or greater. At the time of writing, this requires installing from the Chrome Beta channel but it will soon be released to all Chrome channels.
- If you are not using a mobile device such as a smartphone or a tablet, enable mobile emulation on your desktop browser. AMP pages are only displayed to mobile devices. Next, visit https://g.co/webpackagedemo.
- This will display a search box. From there, enter a query such as [learn amp by example] and click on “Learn AMP by Example” for the ampbyexample.com home page. There are only a small number of publishers that have implemented this feature so far, so you may want to try this specific query. If you’ve completed these steps correctly, you will see “https://ampbyexample.com” displayed in the browser’s URL bar.
“The AMP Cache has preloaded the AMP document and Chrome has cryptographically verified that the AMP document was never modified from what the publisher intended, thus enabling the publisher’s URL to be the one that populates the browser address bar,” explained software engineer for AMP at Google, Greg Grothaus.
You can learn more about how this all works over here.