Whether you’re a site owner with separate Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) or AMP pages that act as the main version of your site, the question of how having one or the other can affect your ranking has been on people’s minds since Google integrated AMP listings into its mobile search results back in February 2016. It’s been addressed numerous times in the past by Google, but John Mueller has once again confirmed that AMP is not a ranking factor through his personal Twitter account.
In a tweet posted in response to another Twitter user asking whether his rankings would be affected if he disabled AMP, Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, restated that it is in fact not. He also went on to say that if you do decide to disable it, you should make sure to redirect appropriately.
Mueller also touched on a similar point the previous day, January 24, 2017, in a Google Hangout from the Google Webmaster central office, later posted to Youtube. Discussing which pages Google can judge the quality of your site by, whether that’s AMP or your main pages, he stated that quality is based on AMP pages if your site was made in AMP and you tell Google those are your primary pages. What this means is that whichever pages are your primary pages, those are the ones Google uses to determine its quality. If your AMP pages are not your primary pages, whether that’s in the form of a desktop or mobile site in which the AMP pages are complimentary, it’s essentially business as usual.
In a plea to site owners everywhere, Mueller also went on to note that, if your AMP pages are not your primary pages, it would be recommended to make those AMP pages shine by including as much content from the primary page as possible. Often people will provide a trimmed down version of their main page in their AMP pages, opting not to include videos, full content, etc., resulting in a terrible user experience that even the AMP team doesn’t like. As he put it in the Google Hangout, “if you have that content then make that content shine on an AMP page”.
Hopefully, by John Mueller confirming it again through Twitter, it can finally put to rest the question of whether AMP has an impact on Google ranking.
