Recently we retired the AMP plugin on our news portals, but then started getting notes from Google saying pages were missing. Basically huge increase in 404s. Google said this is okay way to retire AMP as they will just stop indexing the non-canonical page, and give you a note about it.
I ended up adding 301 redirects from the /amp and /?amp=1 stuff to the canonical main thing to ensure posts were redirected properly. This can be done using the Redirection plugin vs messing with editing your htaccess file, as a regex expression works best. And what is neat about the Redirection plugin (free!), is you can toggle on an option to track redirects for the two versions. (In our case we had started with /amp and then the official AMP plugin suggested changing to /?amp=1. Ugh.)
So, for instance I was kinda surprised the other day to note how many redirects there were since I switched this option on.
e.g.,
^/(.*?)/\?amp=.*
/$1/
301 3,428 May 17, 2024
^/(.*?)/amp/$
/$1/
301 4,206 May 17, 2024
So, quite a bit of redirecting going on, and kind of surprising how much Google invested in making links as /amp vs just normal canonical links. One of the many dumb things Google did trying to impose their will on the internet to show up in their search engine.
Just some anecdotes for a Friday 🙂
Hi simchris, thank you for sharing with us the experience you had retiring the AMP plugin.
Thank you!
