Enhancing AMP implementation with Search Console

SEO admin 4 March 2020 Reading time : 4 minutes

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In recent weeks we have explored various aspects related to AMP pages, highlighting their benefits for the site and bringing you all the latest news about them, such as AMP stories. The project, as we know, is strongly supported by Google and it is not surprising, then, that the latest chapter of the guides to Google Search Console on YouTube is actually dedicated to the implementation of accelerated pages for mobile.

Using Google Search Console to enhance AMP pages

Introducing the GSC tools useful to improve the AMP implementation on the site is once again Daniel Waisberg, who immediately clarifies the goals of this lesson: identifying the AMP issues and errors Google discovered on the site, fix them and then ask Google to verify and validate all repairs performed.

AMP pages, the explanation in short

Before approaching the heart of the speech, the Google Search advocate makes a brief summary of what AMP pages are: the initials stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, an open source HTML framework that provides an accurate method to create web pages that have a fast and smooth upload and prioritize user experience.

Why using AMP framework: the benefits

This technology can be easily used to create entire sites, stories, ads and other useful features, and there are many reasons to use the AMP framework: the speed of the pages improves the user experience and impacts on the core business metrics of the site; they allow you to reduce overhead development, because they are easy to build; there are many components that can be used as site building blocks, already optimized to improve performance.

The benfits of AMP on Google Research

In addition to these general positive effects, according to Waisberg there are also benefits related to the Google Search system: in particular, he mentions the possibility to serve pages through Google cache and to appear in “amp related” experiences.

The status report of AMP pages

Whenever Google detects AMP pages on the site, in the Search Console you can read the AMP status report, which reports any problem or error found on the site and which represents an easy and fast method to improve the AMP implementation, because it allows us to focus our efforts on the most important and urgent tasks.

The first level display reports all AMP pages detected by Google that have problems, grouped by issue; clicking on a specific error we can see its details, including a sample list of affected pages, information on how to solve it and a procedure to notify Google of your corrections. In addition, we can also display the number of impressions of AMP pages on Google, so to figure out how much and how these issues affect our results.

Errors and warnings on the report

Search Console reports are divided into errors and warnings. In the first group fall serious problems that prevent the appearance of our AMP pages among Google search results, such as a page blocked by robots.txt, JavaScript not allowed or invalid layout of the HTML tag specified by the attributes.

The AMP pages with warnings (tips, not errors) are instead indexed and can be shown in the SERP with the classic blue link, but may not appear in the AMP multimedia results or in the carousel top stories, thus making us miss opportunities for visibility and potential clicks. The notifications concern issues such as unoptimized pages or use of deprecated features (which may become errors in the future).

To fix and validate errors

The report organizes by default the issues based on a scale that combines criticality, validation status and number of affected pages and we recommend to first solve the errors caused by a common cause (such as a wrong template) and then dedicating yourself to the unique ones on each page.

Clicking on a single error, we can read additional data and get a guide to solving the problem; also, there it is a button to notify Google about the correction and to ask for validation.

Once discovered which type of problem is present on the site, we can move to the practical job in order to correct it, having two options: to intervene with the modifications to the code in first person or to rely on an “external” developer with the specifico Search Console command, which activates link sharing and guarantees access to the page concerned and to the historical list of validated pages for that problem.

Verifying AMP pages with Google test tools

Google also provides another free tool to check the status of AMP pages: is the AMP test tool, that allows you to verify the validity of the contents starting from the analysis of the entered URL or to load a piece of code to highlight any possible error present. A useful function to debug problems on new pages before publishing them.

Fixing the issue on AMP pages and ask Google for a validation

Now that we have a clear picture of the situation and that we have taken steps to correct the highlighted problems, there are still a few steps to be taken: first of all, Waisberg recommends launching a test of the live version of the page that can confirm the actual resolution of the issue previously found.

Once obtained this further reassurance, we can click on the “Validate and update Google” button to start the process of validation of the changes, which is not immediate and may take even a few days; during this period we will receive notifications from Google about its progress via email.