What are your thoughts on AMP pages?

[wikibum]

Most SEO's I work with have AMP enabled on their websites, however lately I have been noticing a lot of GSC errors which are mostly AMP related. It's mostly the theme conflicting with AMP and the errors are always something weird. AMP pages always display weirdly and sometimes JS scripts don't run correctly, which I guess is fine because they are supposed to have a fast load speed and minimal CSS/JS.

My question is. If you have your website mobile optimized, running on a CDN and it's super fast already - do you need to have AMP installed? Does Google actually give you a ranking boost if you do? I looked at my data and from what I see is that the effect is minimal. Sites that have AMP vs. sites that have no AMP (but are very similar in link profile, DR and onsite strategy) have no noticeable difference in mobile traffic. Off-course other factors come into play when looking at mobile traffic, but I only looked at Google Organic Mobile Traffic in Analytics.

I also understand that AMP is not for everyone. It's best used for news sites, however I am still not sure about blog post/article heavy websites? I think that has to do with how your website is setup? Google does show an AMP sign/small icon on AMP enabled blogs in search results sometimes, so they definitely look for it and display it when they see it, but that doesn't mean they are favoriting AMP pages over others (or at least I don't think so). It might be a factor but how much of a factor is it?

Some sites with non AMP pages are much faster than other sites with AMP pages. That must count for something.

Anyone testing AMP vs. no AMP? What do you think about having it enabled, assuming you have a super mobile optimized website + a CDN setup as well.

Any/all thoughts are appreciated!

 

[Darth]

AMP is not a ranking factor any more (used to be for Google news). It can provide an indirect boost via faster page loading times (like any page can). You will earn less from display ads on it. AMP is dead IMO, no need to bother with it.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I think it was their attempt to copy Facebook Instant Articles which offered us the benefit of FB preloading our articles in the browser with the exchange being that the user never leaves FB’s ecosystem. It reduces your chance of getting more pages per session, ultimately by stripping down extraneous site features. Of course Google incentivized quietly SEOs to adopt it like they did Google+. Turns out that’s rarely enough to get enough adoption to not lay it in its grave eventually.

 

[contract]

No, thank god.

Prefer having control of my site and server. You send me the visitor and the rest is up to me.

 

[Matta28]

If it's possible to ask, what does AMP stand for?

 

[wikibum]

Of course Google incentivized quietly SEOs to adopt it like they did Google+. Turns out that’s rarely enough to get enough adoption to not lay it in its grave eventually.

How would you suggest turning AMP off for sites that have it enabled?

My plan was to turn it off completely/cut it cold turkey (which I guess is the only solution) but then Google (since they have some AMP pages indexed and crawled) - are going to start thinking these pages are all 404s and I am assuming will ding our score a little. That being said, I am ok with taking a blow for a few months to get rid of it and all its unwanted GSC errors.

I also thought about doing a 301 redirect from AMP pages to the non AMP ones. What do you think?

what does AMP stand for?

Accelerated Mobile Pages

 

[Ryuzaki]

I also thought about doing a 301 redirect from AMP pages to the non AMP ones. What do you think?

This is what I’d do with a single redirect to catch all pages. I suck at Regex and can't look up the code right now but it'll be something like:

https://domain.com/{capture the slug with a variable}/amp/
and then
https://domain.com/{the variable}/

Basically grabbing every URL, no matter what, and if it has "amp/" at the end, just stripping the "amp/" from it. You shouldn't have any serious disruptions like that and should retain all your link juice.

 

[wikibum]

Basically grabbing every URL, no matter what, and if it has "amp/" at the end, just stripping the "amp/" from it. You shouldn't have any serious disruptions like that and should retain all your link juice.

Got it! Otherwise, a manual one to one 301 redirect will be a nightmare. Appreciate it!

Looking forward to never receiving an AMP GSC error ever again.

 

[Darth]

^/(.*)/amp/
to
/$1/