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We Removed Google AMP Pages 3 Weeks Ago
On June 28th, three weeks ago, I removed the AMP pages from this site. Overall, I didn’t see overall traffic changes from the change. I did notice issues with this site in Google Discover, a spike in crawl rates, a jump in AMP errors and some more changes.
Here are some charts from Google Search Console showing you what I noticed after removing AMP from this site.
I should note that we removed AMP because I didn’t want to use the workaround for GA4 to track AMP. Plus, AMP is not required anymore for top stories and the like. I followed the Google documentation when removing AMP from this site.
In this chart, you can see the valid AMP pages went from a constant healthy number to zero AMP pages, which is what was expected. You can click on any of the images to enlarge:
And of course, the AMP errors spiked for a bit, also expected:
The “issue” was that Google had the AMP URL referenced in the canonical page but I removed it but there was a delay in the reporting. You can see those details in this drill in report:
The page indexing report started to show more pages indexed with more errors also:
There were issues with this site showing up in Google Discover for a period of time. Plus, for some reasons the images Google Discover showed were smaller. So I used the max image preview tag to fix that (thanks Glenn) and it worked, even though I had no restrictions on the images and the images never changed.
Here is the Discover report, it seems to be coming back, but Discover itself is hard to predict and rarely ever stable:
Here is the image issue (Glenn took screenshots):
In case you were wondering how Barry’s posts were showing up in Discover after removing AMP (and before max-image-preview was included), here is a before/after. Google’s docs explain to add max-image-preview to show larger images in Discover (or by using AMP). pic.twitter.com/0nS3OCh0Lr
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 21, 2023
Also as expected was a huge spike in crawl stats:
Overall, I think removing AMP from this site went pretty smoothly. The only real hiccup were the images shown in Google Discover being smaller than normal, which we got fixed.
How did your efforts removing AMP from your sites go? Was it similar?
Also, it has only been three weeks but by now you can see the direction things went and are now going.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
