Google has finally added a help document in their developer section explaining how publishers and webmasters can remove AMP content from showing up in search results. Of course, Google doesn’t want you to stop serving up AMP content but if you decide that AMP is not driving the metrics you wanted to see, you can now safely remove your AMP content by following the instructions below.
Google links to the support documents for popular content management system providers including WordPress, Drupal and Squarespace. For other platforms or custom build solutions, Google has provided three methods to removing AMP content from search.
From their instructions linked above:
Method 1: Remove AMP from Google Search
Use this method to remove your AMP pages from Google Search without displaying
an error to the user.
- Remove the
rel="amphtml"link from the canonical page in the source code. - Configure your server to return either an HTTP 301 Moved Permanently or 302
Found response for the removed AMP page. - Configure a redirect from the removed AMP page to the canonical page.
- Verify the removal of your AMP page by searching for your content using
Google Search. To verify removal of a large number of AMP pages, use the Accelerated Mobile
Pages (AMP) report.
Method 2: Remove AMP from Google Search and non-Google platforms
Use this method to remove your AMP page from Google Search and Google AMP Cache
while keeping permalinks to the removed pages.
- Remove the
rel="amphtml"link from your canonical page’s HTML source. - Add a ‘noindex’ header or
noindexmeta tag to prevent Googlebot from crawling your AMP pages. - Submit an updated sitemap through the Google Search
Console or using the Webmaster
Tools API that excludes your AMP pages. - Verify the removal of your AMP page by searching for your content using
Google Search. To verify removal of a large number of AMP pages, use Search Console AMP
report. - Remove your AMP page so that it is no longer accessible.
- Configure your server to send an HTTP 404 Not Found for your removed AMP
page to Google user-agents, such as Googlebot. This will ensure that Google AMP
Cache does not serve stale content to other platforms. - If you want to keep permalinks active, configure your server to send an HTTP
301 Redirect for your removed AMP page to your canonical page.
Method 3: Stop serving AMP from Google Search as quickly as possible
- Delete the AMP page from your server.
- Ensure your server returns a HTTP 404 Not Found response for the deleted
file. - Remove the
rel="amphtml"link from canonical page’s HTML source for each AMP
page that you deleted in step 1. - Ask
Google to recrawl the canonical page. - Repeat steps 1-4 for each AMP page that you want to remove.
Hat tip to @suzukik for spotting this new technical document.
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