Google’s John Mueller Offers Guidance on Building AMP-Only Sites by @MattGSouthern
Google’s John Mueller recently provided some advice on what to look out for when creating an AMP-only site.
A site owner started a thread on Reddit asking whether it was a good idea to have an AMP-only site, or if it would be more beneficial to add some regular pages as well.
Mueller replied saying there’s no problem with having an AMP-only site. In fact, he appreciates seeing more of them lately.
“I don’t see an issue with using an AMP-only site – it’s a great framework to make fast sites relatively easily. Since it’s essentially HTML, it’ll work the same as any other HTML page. It’s awesome to see more AMP-only sites pop up, it can make things so much easier (for crawling, indexing, & SEO in general) when you just have a single URL for each piece of content!”
Mueller went on to provide additional guidance on creating AMP-only sites, giving a heads up on what to watch out for.
“The one thing you might want to watch out for is JavaScript-based components within the framework, to make sure that they work (=allow the content to be indexed) across the search engines that you’re interested in. Google’s pretty good at rendering, so at least there you’d probably be fine.”
Site owners can check to see if Google is indexing the JavaScript-based components properly on their AMP-only site.
Mueller explains how:
“A simple way to check is to take some of the textual content you’re displaying with any fancier elements that you use, and just search for that on these search engines, to see if it’s indexed at all.”
When it comes having images indexed on AMP-only sites, site owners need to make sure they’re using the “noscript” fallback.
Those who are interested in creating AMP-only sites should consider looking into the official AMP for WordPress plugin.
It recently received an update designed to make it easier to create those types of sites.
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