If you are noticing less traffic to your website’s AMP pages coming from Twitter, turns out there is a reason for that: Twitter has subtly updated its AMP guidelines page on its Developer site to say support for AMP will be phased out by the fourth quarter.
How that might affect you. Previously, if a mobile user clicked on a link to your site, Twitter would redirect them to the AMP version of that page if an AMP version was available. Now, that won’t happen and users will just load the native mobile/responsive version of your content.
Thanks for telling us. We’ve heard anecdotally that publishers have been seeing AMP traffic fall, especially since Google started putting non-AMP pages in its Top Stories section. But it was David Esteve, audience development specialist and product manager at Marfeel, and technical SEO consultant Christian Oliveira who spotted the update in Twitter’s documentation.
Looking at our own data, we’ve seen sharp Twitter referral declines since August. But, traffic completely bottomed out in November suggesting the rollout is complete.
We’ve seen similar declines in LinkedIn referrals to AMP pages and have reached out to the company to find out if it is also dropping support. We will update this post when we get a definitive answer.
Why we care. Since Google announced AMP will no longer be required for Top Stories, many publishers have been asking themselves if continuing to support AMP is still worth it. The main worry has been the risk of traffic loss if publishers rely fully on their native mobile experiences for ranking. But, if social media traffic to AMP pages is going to drop as support is lifted, the need for AMP seems to get smaller.
About The Author
Henry Powderly is vice president of content for Third Door Media, publishers of Search Engine Land and MarTech. With more than a decade in editorial leadership positions, he is responsible for content strategy and event programming for the organization.