During the submitted question and answer segment of one recent John Mueller hangout, an SEO professional asked John about AMP pages.
Their main question was: should we expect a drop in traffic if we remove AMP?
John said that he is assuming that this is a setup where there are traditional HTML pages and AMP pages.
He expanded on this with the fact that there are some search features that are limited to AMP only pages.
However, he doesn’t believe there are any at the moment and would have to double check.
He reiterated that he does not believe there are any features which are just limited in scope to AMP pages.
The thing he mentioned about AMP pages is that they do tend to be very fast, and it’s also easier to make very fast AMP pages.
Since Google uses speed and page experience as a ranking factor, it’s something where if you have a lot of very fast pages in AMP, but you switch to slower pages that are non-AMP, you may see an impact there.
You can make very fast pages that are not AMP also, so speed is not limited to AMP.
If you turn off AMP on an AMP website, you may see a transitional period where remaining AMP pages are in the AMP cache, and it’s taking a while to purge those out.
However, it’s still possible to turn these off.
This happens at approximately the 30:43 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 30:43
Should we expect a drop in traffic if we remove AMP?
John (Answer) 30:47
So I assume this is a setup where you have kind of traditional HTML pages and AMP pages, and you link between them? I think there are three things that kind of come together when you remove AMP pages like this. On the one hand, there are some search features that are limited to AMP only pages. I don’t think there are any at the moment, I would have to double check. But I don’t think there are any search features at the moment that are only available to AMP pages. So from that point of view, like you wouldn’t be losing anything there.
The other thing is that AMP pages tend to be very fast, or it’s easier to make very fast AMP pages. And since we do use speed and kind of the page experience as a ranking factor, it is something where if you have a lot of very fast pages in AMP, and you switch over to slower pages that are non-AMP, then you might see an effect there.
You can, of course, make very fast pages that are not AMP as well, like it’s not limited to AMP. So that’s something where I would double check to see how things with regards to speed apply there. And I think the third one is there, there’s occasionally this assumption that AMP pages somehow rank better. And that’s not the case, AMP is not a ranking factor. So it shouldn’t be something where you would see a change in ranking, just because you have AMP pages, or you don’t have AMP pages.
So all of those things kind of together, if you can make sure that your normal pages are fast and equivalent, and you have all of the structured data that you need in those normal pages, then probably you can turn off AMP. And it’ll be essentially very similar. What you’ll probably see is kind of a transitional period of some AMP pages still being in the AMP cache and kind of taking a while to bubble out. But in general, it’s possible to turn these off.
We have a Help Center article about this kind of turning off of AMP pages. So I would double check that as well. Yeah, I think that’s pretty much it, with regards to AMP. With regards to crawling, you probably already see that AMP pages tend to be crawled a little bit more often because we refresh the cache through crawling as well.
So if you don’t have those extra AMP pages, then our crawling will be focused more on the rest of your site. So you might see a rise in kind of crawl activity on the kind of traditional pages that you have there.
