AMP
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are a stripped HTML version of a page with limited JavaScript functionality, designed to be optimized for speed and cached by Google to preload in search results for an improved user experience. There are several things to keep in mind when utilizing AMP on your site, these are detailed in our Hangout Notes.
You Can Have an AMP Only Site
It’s possible to have a purely AMP site without an HTML version.
Views of Cached AMP Pages Won’t Appear in Log Files
AMP pages may make log files look unusual as Google is requesting the page to update the cache but the page will appear to receive little traffic because users see the cached version of the page.
AMP Page Should Cleanly Map Onto Desktop Page
AMP pages should be equivalent to the desktop version. Avoid giving a teaser AMP version of the desktop page or combining multiple desktop pages to make one AMP page.
John Suggests Considering a PW-AMP Set up – a PWA Combined With AMP Content
Google have been looking into a PW-AMP set up, combining a PWA with AMP content. John suggests this combination is something worth looking into.
AMP Pages Can be Bulk Validated Using a Validator From Command Line
It is possible to validate that AMP pages have been configured correctly in bulk. This can be done using a validator that can be run from the command line.
Ensure AMP & Desktop Content Consistent – Avoid Previews on AMP
Make sure content on AMP pages is consistent with the desktop version. Avoid having a preview of the content on the AMP page which links through to the desktop page. This is a poor user experience.
Don’t Dynamically Serve AMP Pages
John thinks that AMP pages are crawled with normal Googlebot, so this would make it tricky if you were dynamically serving AMP pages, as Googlebot wouldn’t see this. Dynamically served AMP pages would also be tricky for non-Google services like Twitter if they wanted to pull out the AMP version of a page.
Technically Possible to Make AMP the Mobile Version of a Site
With the introduction of Mobile-first Indexing, if there is a mobile version of a page Google will use that for indexing and ranking. If you have a responsive site, that is the mobile version. Technically it is possible to make AMP pages the mobile version of your site but this is tricky to set up and isn’t beneficial in practice.
AMP Pages Don’t Need to Link to Other AMP Pages
From an AMP page you can either link to other AMP pages or to normal pages on your site. However you should never links to the cached AMP page URLs as there is no guaruantee that the pages will exist already.
Google Doesn’t Recommend Dynamically Serving AMP Content
You can dynamically serve AMP content but it’s not recommended as tricky to get right and diagnose issues. They recommend using separate URLs for AMP or putting the entire site on AMP.