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Rankings dropped after implementing AMP (3)

10-20-2017 03:26 PM #1 incomestore (Member)
Rankings dropped after implementing AMP

Hey guys,

Super excited to be part of this community! Just joined earlier this month and already learned helpful information just by browsing the forums.

I ran into an issue recently when implementing AMP on one of my sites and hoping someone can help me think through what went wrong and I how I can fix it.

On Sept 14, 2017 I implemented AMP on one of the sites I manage with the purpose of eventually ranking better as a result of faster site load time. The next day I set 301 redirects so that all traffic going to https://www.websiteurl.com/specific-page/ redirected to https://www.websiteurl.com/specific-page/amp/ thinking that this would help speed up Google's indexing of the new AMP pages. Well in retrospect I'm not sure if that was so smart of an idea.

Attached to this thread I have a screenshot of organic traffic from June 2015 through now (Oct 2017). In that screenshot, you can see that shortly after I implemented AMP (Sept 14), traffic dropped significantly (as a result of rankings dropping). To this day I still don't understand why that happened, but my guesses are that it either had something to do with the 301 redirects I set up (bad move on my part?) or the change I made to the top (above-the-fold) ad on AMP vs non-AMP pages.

Eventually on Oct 2 (earlier this month) I turned off AMP (I was using a Wordpress plugin) and created 301 redirects to point traffic from AMP pages to their non-AMP counter parts. In other words, 301 redirects now point traffic from https://www.websiteurl.com/specific-page/amp/ to https://www.websiteurl.com/specific-page/ Thankfully this seemed to have stopped the rankings/traffic from continuing to decrease (it flatlined) but I'm surprised the rankings haven't recovered to the point they were before implementing AMP.

Any thoughts? I'm specifically looking for feedback/ideas on how to get rankings back to where they were before I implemented AMP, but I'll take any other feedback/ideas too.

Thanks!

10-25-2017 12:42 AM #2 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Sorry for the noob questions - I haven't done SEO for a few years - but what is AMP? Accelerated Mobile Project?

https://www.ampproject.org/

Why not just undo everything and restore the original structure?



Amy

10-25-2017 01:37 AM #3 eloquence (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by incomestore View Post
Hey guys,

Super excited to be part of this community! Just joined earlier this month and already learned helpful information just by browsing the forums.

I ran into an issue recently when implementing AMP on one of my sites and hoping someone can help me think through what went wrong and I how I can fix it.

On Sept 14, 2017 I implemented AMP on one of the sites I manage with the purpose of eventually ranking better as a result of faster site load time. The next day I set 301 redirects so that all traffic going to https://www.websiteurl.com/specific-page/ redirected to https://www.websiteurl.com/specific-page/amp/ thinking that this would help speed up Google's indexing of the new AMP pages. Well in retrospect I'm not sure if that was so smart of an idea.

Attached to this thread I have a screenshot of organic traffic from June 2015 through now (Oct 2017). In that screenshot, you can see that shortly after I implemented AMP (Sept 14), traffic dropped significantly (as a result of rankings dropping). To this day I still don't understand why that happened, but my guesses are that it either had something to do with the 301 redirects I set up (bad move on my part?) or the change I made to the top (above-the-fold) ad on AMP vs non-AMP pages.

Eventually on Oct 2 (earlier this month) I turned off AMP (I was using a Wordpress plugin) and created 301 redirects to point traffic from AMP pages to their non-AMP counter parts. In other words, 301 redirects now point traffic from https://www.websiteurl.com/specific-page/amp/ to https://www.websiteurl.com/specific-page/ Thankfully this seemed to have stopped the rankings/traffic from continuing to decrease (it flatlined) but I'm surprised the rankings haven't recovered to the point they were before implementing AMP.

Any thoughts? I'm specifically looking for feedback/ideas on how to get rankings back to where they were before I implemented AMP, but I'll take any other feedback/ideas too.

Thanks!
My guess is that you were penalized because you 301'd ALL traffic to the AMP pages. AMP is specifically design for mobile, but the 301 will point all traffic, including desktop, to there.

Since the AMP pages are stripped down versions of your main pages, they don't contain the same structure or content as your normal desktop pages. What you want to do is give your website the option to serve either the normal desktop version OR the AMP version to mobile visitors. On mobile, you will get a boost in SERPs for having those AMP pages.

The AMP section should appear in Google Search Console for you after that for you to monitor performance. Depending on what CMS you are using for your sites, I might be able to give additional guidance.



Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
Sorry for the noob questions - I haven't done SEO for a few years - but what is AMP? Accelerated Mobile Project?

https://www.ampproject.org/

Why not just undo everything and restore the original structure?



Amy
AMP is a project Google created to streamline how mobile pages are loaded to produce near instant page loads on mobile. It basically is a stripped down version of HTML for the page with asynchronous JavaScript (lets scripts load at the same time instead of one after the other) served over Google's CDN.

Sites that are equipped with AMP are getting a boost in search results on mobile from the big G.

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