Thursday, November 16, 2017
To improve our users’ experience with AMP results, we are making changes to how we enforce our
policy on content parity with AMP. Starting Feb 1, 2018, the policy requires that the AMP page
content be comparable to the (original) canonical page content. AMP is not a ranking signal and
there is no change in terms of the ranking policy with respect to AMP.
The open source accelerated mobile pages project (AMP)
launched in 2015
and has seen tremendous growth with over
25M domains
having implemented the AMP format. This rapid progress comes with a sense of responsibility of
ensuring that our users continue to have a great content consumption experience that ultimately
leads to more engagement with publisher content.
In some cases, webmasters publish two versions of their content: a canonical page that is not
based on AMP and an AMP page. In the ideal scenario, both these pages have equivalent content
leading the user to get the same content but with a faster and smoother experience via AMP.
However, in some cases the content on the AMP page does not match the content on its original
(canonical) page.
In a small number of cases, AMP pages are used as teaser pages which create a particularly bad
user experience since they only contain minimal content. In these instances, users have to click
twice to get to the real content. Below is an example of how this may look like: a brief text of
the main article and then asking the user to click to visit another page to complete reading the
article.
AMP was introduced to dramatically improve the performance of the web and deliver a fast,
consistent content consumption experience. In keeping with this goal, we’ll be enforcing
the requirement
of close parity between AMP and canonical page, for pages that wish to be shown in Google Search
as AMPs.
Where we find that an AMP page doesn’t contain the same critical content as its non-AMP
equivalent, we will direct our users to the non-AMP page. This does not affect Search ranking.
However, these pages will not be considered for Search features that require AMP, such as the Top
Stories carousel with AMP. Additionally, we will notify the webmaster via
Search console
as a manual action message and give the publisher the opportunity to fix the issue before its AMP page can be served again. The
AMP open source website
has several helpful guides to help produce fast, beautiful and high-performing AMP pages.
We hope this change encourages webmasters to maintain content parity between the canonical and AMP
equivalent. This will lead to better experience on your site and ultimately happier users.
How we apply this
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
Related services