Hi, my site is http://www.in2town.co.uk and my site rankings are being affected by AMP. I have had someone look into this for me and they have told me the pages are not being indexed. please see the information below. I am looking for a solution to this problem
Please read the below.
All of your AMP pages contain canonical tags pointing to their parents. The problem is, a canonical tag says to Google “I am not the ‘main’ version of this page. The main version is over there! Don’t index me at all, index the page I am pointing to instead” – so in many ways the canonical tag also functions like a no-index tag, because the page using it is deemed non-canonical and is usually kicked out of Google’s index
This would mean that all of your AMP pages stand insanely low chance of being served by Google. As such, any bonuses you would have gotten for introducing AMP, are nullified because you have removed all your AMP URLs from indexation (via canonical tags). Someone has been over-zealous with crawl-sculpting, which isn’t great. Would I expect this alone to make your site an SEO-disaster? No. But if all the little things get done wrong, they don’t add up to much (right?). When you use hreflangs to specify alternate language URLs, you don’t canonical back to the main (English) language URL. You just use hreflangs on their own, and allow Google to index those foreign pages. With AMP it’s the same, you should specify where your AMP page versions are from the main pages using AMP tags – but you should not canonical the AMP page back to the main page (it’s redundant and can cause problems!)
Please can you provide me with a solution to this.
hi,
Disclaimer, I do not work for Tagdiv, i am a customer like you.
AMP pages should have the parent(non-amp) page as canonical. This is normal and correct.
This is even explained plain and simple on the amp project website here: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/discovery
Google even explicitly said to in multiple other occasions to make the amp page as canonical to the original non-amp page.
But, this is important: The only time you would want to have the amp page canonical to itself is when the amp page does NOT have any non-amp variant. In this case, yes you should have it canonical to itself.
In regards to what you said, “I have had someone look into this for me and they have told me the pages are not being indexed.” – unfortunately you will find stuff like this on the internet from people that that think they like SEO because they visit a forum on this topic, but they create a bad name for actual SEO professionals when they suggest wrong things. I like to think this is caused by the “Dunning-Kruger” effect 🙂
I like coding, I can understand a PHP code when I read it… yet me suggesting code modifications to a developer would be… 🙂
Anyway, I hope he did not charge you for this. I have been a professional SEO for 6 years and I usually don’t even charge my clients for small details like this, let alone that the info he gave you was actually wrong.
so are you saying that this is wrong. This information was given to me by a seo company who looked at my site. My site http://www.in2town.co.uk has had serious problems. I was getting more than 2,000 visitors a day more than a year ago but then i got two seo companies involved and my traffic has dropped with some days going as low as 40 visitors.
The information above has come from a seo company who looked at my site to try and find out what has gone wrong and the damage that has been caused. they said the amp pages are not doing me any favors as above. i installed the amp plugin to get mobile visitors. all the pages on the mobile are the same as my website. there is no content that is just for the amp pages.
they also said
• Having so many parameter-based filtering URLs de-indexed the same way, is probably another mistake. Doing this is only needed on sites where these spiral out of control, on yours they don’t – right? So someone has been doing cookie-cutter bullshit SEO implementations
so, are you saying my amp pages are ok as they are.
Hi again,
Yes, the information they gave you is WRONG.
Yes, your amp pages are ok as they are implemented by Newspaper. The AMP page should have a canonical link to the original non-amp variant of that page. The ONLY reason to link an amp page as canonical to itself is when the non-amp version does not exist. That’s it
I am an actual SEO professional working in this field for a bit over 6 years. In SEO what you know today might not be valid next week anymore. That’s what differentiates an actual professional from someone that throws 10-15 years of experience in your face just to sell his product. If you don’t believe me that’s ok too but you can simply visit the official AMP project page: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/discovery#linking-pages-with-link
It reads black on white exactly what I told was the correct way to do it. This is Google’s official page for the amp project 🙂 And it’s common knowledge for an SEO … really.
It amazes me that an SEO company would tell you that. Honestly … you have been dealing with amateurs if they told you that. A company that I can only say would charge people for poor seo audits and taking their money because the customer doesn’t know the subject and they think they can take advantage maybe. Only 2 reasons they would sell you wrong info: a) they are trying to cheat you and charge you for information they are inventing or b) they don’t have a clue about SEO
I hope you understand. But what I can tell you as an actual professional, don’t work with this company.
Have a good day,
Claudiu
any chance you could do an audit on my site as i am struggling to find out what damage has been caused by the two previous seo companies for my traffic to drop so much. i am losing around 2,000 visitors a day
