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We knew this was coming and at the AMP Conference in Tokyo, Google announced support for publishers to use their own URLs when serving AMP pages in Google search. This is powered through signed exchanges and supported with more modern browsers.
Here is how it looks:
A signed exchange to me seems like when you register an SSL certificate. In this case, you register your signed exchange with a provider, I believe CloudFlare is one of the first to do this and then if you get verified, you get added to a registry. The more modern browsers can then look up the AMP cache URLs to see if they have a match in the registry and then show the defined URL by the publisher.
Google explains it as A signed exchange is a file format, defined in the web packaging specification, that allows the browser to trust a document as if it belongs to your origin. This allows you to use first-party cookies and storage to customize content and simplify analytics integration. Your page appears under your URL instead of the google.com/amp URL. Google Search links to signed exchanges when the publisher, browser, and the Search experience context all support it. As a publisher, you will need to publish both the signed exchange version of the content in addition to the non-signed exchange version.
I love it when former Googlers go off on how bad Google is, here is Pierre Far on this - see his full Twitter stream, I'll just include the lead:
Signed HTTP exchanges are now a thing before even completing the standardization process. That's because Google needs it to shove AMP in every web corner it controls (and beyond to a degree).
— Pierre Far (@pierrefar) April 17, 2019
(Accurate) Snark aside, what is this thing and is it good?
There is a lot of coverage around this announcement.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
