AMP

John confirmed that as AMP is not a ranking factor, removing AMP pages shouldn’t have a direct impact on SEO. However, users should consider the potential knock-on effects caused by a drop in page speed (AMP pages tend to be faster than non-AMP ones, but that’s not a guarantee. There’s also nothing to suggest you can’t make regular pages very fast). AMP pages also tend to be crawled a little heavier than non-AMP, so you might also see a rise in crawl activity across the rest of the site.

Converting image formats (for example from JPEG to WebP) has the potential to impact existing rankings. Where possible, it’s recommended to keep the same image URLs and just swap out the files. Otherwise, Google will need to discover and index those new URLs in the same way it would for text-based content.

Despite being built on AMP, Web Stories are essentially normal web pages. They should therefore be linked internally in the same way as any other content. Text is also required on these pages for Google to be able to rank them accordingly.

AMP pages should consistently match what users would see on normal pages, regardless of a site being moved to mobile-first indexing. It’s OK if some features are missing, but the AMP page content should generally match the content on your normal pages.

If a site has different structured markup on their desktop and mobile sites, Google would use the schema that is on the version they are currently crawling and indexing. It’s a little different with AMP as certain structured data types are required for some AMP features, so Google also takes this into account. John recommends ensuring the structured data types used across the different versions of a page are consistent.

When displaying AMP pages, Google is able to pre-render and cache them directly from the search results, which saves the time typically spent retrieving the initial HTML to get the rendered version. However, this isn’t something that is taken into account in the testing tools.

If there is no redirect to the AMP version of a page, Google testing tools will test and display results for the individual regular URL rather than the AMP version, unless you explicitly the test the AMP URL.

Structured markup needs to be included on both the AMP and the normal version of a page to be displayed in search e.g. article markup.

Google rank AMP pages the same as they rank other pages, so there is no inherent ranking advantage when using AMP. However, AMP pages are typically faster than HTML pages, which can provide site speed benefits, particularly on mobile. Some search features also require AMP in order to display correctly due to actions such as pre-caching.

When deciding between implementing AMP or a PWA for your site, John recommends choosing the one most suited to your needs. For example, PWAs will be useful for websites providing interactive elements and offline accessibility, whereas AMP is great for publishing content.