This is actually a complicated topic. Advertising earnings may be lower but what happens when your regular pages stop performing in the mobile index. Advertising may really crash. It is pretty clear where google is going in terms of prioritizing AMP.
Google is pretty smart and 404s don’t really damage your SEO – just delete the plugin if you really want to do that. I would then create 301 permanent redirects from /amp to your regular posts. In fact I wouldn’t even bother doing that. The 404s will get dropped by google anyway within a short period of time.
But I would suggest, instead of deleting it why don’t you try different options?
As AMP is growing every day above the expectation level, I think you don’t want to regret it later.
May be you were using AMP with Mobile redirection enabled, try to disable and check.
Or may be you have not added Ads in AMP pages, try to add them.
May be this can change the whole scenario.
Let me know your thoughts on it.
No, i am not using Mobile redirection.
I have added AMP for ads extension and i am currently showing 3 ads on the AMP site. In prominent positions with regular differentiation in ads. But no success with many different ad formats and positions.
The problem is, my desktop earnings are 85% of the site and the mobile earnings are just 10%. But pageviews wise, desktop has 50% of the pageviews and mobile has 50%. Do note that i earn at least 4 figures and sometimes 5 from advertising so we are talking of significant percentages. 10% here and there is big.
Even when i remove AMP, mobile version of the website might generate lesser revenues as compared to destkop. But i am targeting around 25% revenue of the website.
Interesting and I agree with Marqas – you may regret slowly. Can you show us an example of a page which performs well non-amp but poorly in amp. Are we talking sign-ups or are we talking clickable ads?
Yes. We are talking of clickable ads. And the performance is not on mobile vs amp. It is desktop vs mobile. As i said, mobile pageviews are driving 10% of the revenue even though they are driving 40% or more of the traffic. Thats a big difference.
So i want to remove AMP and try my normal theme. Can you explain why i will regret this decision? My normal theme is genesis and i have the site very fast (which is needed if i want to compete with AMP).
I use genesis too – it is a great framework and super fast if you add W3TC and cloudflare to it.
Regret in the sense that google is prioritizing AMP in its mobile index. It may not be doing this yet in a big way for everything but it is creeping in and could be a tie breaker versus your competition. As time passes, the direction of travel is obvious.
By using AMP I have seen an average jump of 4 places in the mobile index across my sites. This may be coincidence. In my case, I want people to phone a medical practice as opposed to clicking ads. It appears to have had a small positive effect in terms of conversion and traffic is up a little too.
I see – you are wondering if normal mobile pages convert better.
In terms of 404s we have had this question before. Personally, I would deactivate the plugin and let google do its job – submit a new sitemap, do a few fetches in the google console for the most important pages and things will return fairly quickly. You could also do some 301 redirects or redirect matches in your .htaccess aswell. People will then get redirected as opposed to getting a 404.
Yes. Even i use Genesis + Kinsta + Keycdn. Speed wise there is no problem at all.
I personally think google will stop supporting AMP in some time. There are reports all across the web that AMP is not giving much earnings in terms of clickable ads. Let us not forget – Google is predominantly an Advertising company. I dont see google products bringing in as much revenue as advertising. So google itself will see the results of AMP and might not push it.
If AMP was successful, google would have already made it a ranking factor. Just like it is pushing https as a ranking factor. But frakly, many people have vocally opposed AMP including top SEO’s and I have seen my links drop down in search traffic and many of my competitors are NON-AMP. Which is surprising. Thats why the thought process.
Yup. I think the old tried and tested method of removing the plugin and then doing a 301 redirect sounds perfect. That would be the best method because it has worked well for many people. Will continue with that.
Glad that helped. I think it is the best way forward.
I personally think that google will do what is in google’s interests too. In a big way they are dealing with your issue themselves. However, web sites in mobiles are generally poor (not everyone runs the type of setups we have) and that has a big effect on ad earnings through bounce rates. Google is pretty much committed to its mobile index as it is the only real growth area of search. At the end of the day, google will do what the big media players want because that is where their interests are. Those corps are quite happy to be above you and me in carousels and on rich cards, etc. There is also the issue of bandwidth being used overall – networks cost money.
My take is two identical pages – one AMP and the other normal – I think the AMP page will have the edge in the mobile index. Don’t forget that in an AMP page the ratio of real content to page size is considerably better. The payload is also smaller.
