This is a short essay on AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages and why you should be VERY careful using AMP.
Normally when you create a website you should easily be able to occupy position one on page one for a search on the URL without extension. This means that a search like this: Trinity Sisters will show you Trinity Sisters as the very first. Of course, there are factors like the number of backlinks and other sites with the same words in the URL – competition, but the site should still be pretty near position one.
The first thing we noticed was that TrinitySisters.net disappeared TOTALLY from Google’s index!!! It was NOT there anymore !!!!
Google Search Console told us that the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) version of the site had a ton of script errors and of course they did not provide ANY clues to these errors!
We had experts looking at the site, and they all agreed that there were NO script errors and Google got it wrong. So trying to do something we tried another AMP plugin, submit the site for a new review and wait. That didn’t make any difference whatsoever.
Then we tried deleting plugins – half of them each time and narrowed it down to Really Simple SSL. It has probably nothing to do with Really Simple SSL as it works brilliantly on gazillions of sites all over the world AND both the SSL plugins we used caused errors. BUT there is a reference to SSL in the image below.
When we deleted this plugin and submitted the site again the AMP errors disappeared very slowly over the next month. The number of script errors began to decrease in Search Console. The first three days they reviewed three pages and three AMP errors disappeared. Then Google slowed down and it would take 3-4 days between new reviews – probably because they will not allow people to ‘spam’ the Review button.
After one and a half months, Trinity Sisters began showing up in Google. On page 20! Slowly during the next two months, the site climbed to page 7-8 – which means position 70-80 which clearly was better than before but not good enough yet.
It doesn’t make sense that Really Simple SLL has + 5,000,000 installations and creates AMP errors.
And why isn’t this good enough?
Simple! These search engines have TrinitySisters.net on position ONE:
- SwissCows.ch
- Yandex.com
- Yahoo.com
- DuckDuckGo.com
- BaiDu.com
- AOL.com
- Bing.com
- Yandex.ru
- iSearch.Babylon.com
- Rambler.ru
- Lycos
- Seznam.cz
And Google has TrinitySisters in positions 70-80…
This tells me that Google AMP has a BUG! So only one thing left to do:
Uninstall the AMP Plugin and clean up AMP Pages
One of our search engine experts at MakeItCountSEO.com got an idea that made our site climb approximately 20 positions up. On the site, he created a 301 redirect and began visiting all AMP versions of the site and 14 days later June 14. 2020 TrinitySisters.net was on position 50-65 which is better but still, we had a long way to go. You can use this plugin: Redirection WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
This little trick tells Google that the AMP version of the page has been permanently moved and Google will delete the page from the AMP cache on their servers, and it is a perfectly ‘legal’ white hat SEO trick. We also made feedback to Google but who knows if they even read those…
And of course, we are still looking for other factors that can cause Google to rank TrinitySisters.net in positions 50-60. Factors that apparently are hidden.
Trinity Sisters 30 days later.
The past 30 days we worked on getting traffic up and we got it from 25 visitors/day to 250 visitors/day. We also got one extra backlink which is DS 43 which isn’t remarkable enough to make any noticeable difference.
TrinitySisters.net is more and more to be found at pos. 8-12 the last week. But A week isn’t much, so we will just have to wait and see.
We also found out that we have the worst Google positions in Europe and the best in the US, but as it is now it seems that Europe is also moving up to pos. 8-12.
Approximately 1 out of 10 searches will still show Trinity Sisters on page 4 or 5. Even if it is 10 or 20 searches in a few minutes. Google’s AI is like a crazy woman (sorry for the analogy) who is caught up in drama and can’t find anything…
But one thing we have noticed with Google is that a long-tail keyword such as “trinity sisters trafficking” ends up showing 4 sites with links to Trinitysisters and the rest of the results has NOTHING related to Trinity Sisters AT ALL! NOTHING!
Google is BROKEN! Bert is dyslexic!
The very last thing we did was delete the AMP plugins and forget everything about AMP. That worked! A few months later TrinitySisters was back in position one and has remained there ever since.
This crazy AMP story leaves us with the following things to consider:
It looks VERY much like AMP is BUGGED! The very best thing you can do is NOT to use AMP! If you want a fast-loading website there are several other performance optimization things you can do that work much better.
If you chose to use Google AMP make sure you have Google Analytics on your site and keep an eye out in GA for errors on your webs site! Otherwise, you won’t notice something is wrong until your site disappears totally from Google search results.
This is how AMP SHOULD work:
