Scott Services: Google: AMP Not Ranking Factor But If AMP Page Is Canonical, It Will Be Used For Site Quality

Wednesday, 25 January 2017

Google: AMP Not Ranking Factor But If AMP Page Is Canonical, It Will Be Used For Site Quality

Google AMP

John Mueller addressed two different questions around AMP in the past 24 hours or so. The first, he said AMP is not a ranking factor. Google said this before, many times, but again, he said it on Twitter saying, if you do or don’t have AMP, it doesn’t improve your rankings just because it is AMP:

@amro_d80 @googlewmc AMP isn’t a ranking factor; if you decide to disable it, make sure to redirect appropriately.

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) January 25, 2017

The second bit was from the hangout the yesterday on YouTube at the 11:46 mark, hat tip to @glenngabe where he said Google can judge the quality of your site/pages based on your AMP pages, if your AMP pages are your canonical version. Meaning, if you make your site in AMP and you tell Google that is your primary version, then Google will judge the AMP pages.

Here is the transcript of that and note how he said at the bottom, the AMP team wants your AMP pages to be as content and feature rich as your main content.

Are AMP pages used in calculating the site quality and Panda? Are they treated like normal pages from a site quality point?

So I guess you need to differentiate between AMP pages that are tied in as separate AMP pages for your website and AMP pages that are the canonical version of your site.

So if you use AMP as a way of making your site, which which you can, that they’re a bunch of sites out there that are using AMP kind of as a JavaScript framework for making sites, which is perfectly fine and then if it’s a canonical URL for search, if it’s the one that we actually index, then yes we will use that when determining the quality of the site when looking at things overall.

So if it’s a canonical will use that. If it’s not the canonical if it’s like an added AMP page, to your desktop site, to your mobile site, then we’ll focus on the canonical when it comes to determining the quality of the page itself.

So those are essentially the the two main options there.

One thing I also ask here is if you’re using AMP as a separate page for your site and then I try to make sure that as much as possible that the AMP version is actually equivalent to your main version. So avoid the situation where the AMP is kind of a trim down version of your page that doesn’t have videos, it doesn’t have the full content, because that’s a terrible user experience. And I know the AMP team really doesn’t like it when people serve low quality AMP instead of normal pages. So if you have that content then make that content shine on a AMP page.

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