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Switching to AMP Won’t Negate Other SEO & Google Algo Issues on a Site

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The use of AMP is an interesting one.  For many site owners, using AMP can result in a lift in traffic, but this is because AMP gets priority placement, such as the carousel placements.  But it doesn’t specifically get an additional ranking boost outside of the regular mobile friendly one.

But an interesting question came up about whether using AMP might help a site that is being impacted negatively overcome that demotion in the search results.

Here is what John Mueller said:

As far as I understand, AMP would not increase rankings, it just shows your site slightly differently so of course, depending on how you track the rankings of your site, if your site is shown, for example, in the top stories carousel, then that might be something that looks like a ranking boost there.  But a lot of these search elements are available for any type of page, so from that point of view, it’s not that you would automatically get a ranking boost just for you from using AMP.

We think AMP is a great technology, a great way to make pages really vast and really usable, so I would totally encourage people to try it out but I wouldn’t do it with kind of the mindset of “I will implement AMP and then I will get this automatic ranking boost in Google and all my troubles will be gone.”  You will have all of the normal issues around web search where you have to make a really good website.

He also specifically mentions content quality.  Bad content is still bad content, regardless of how it is formatted.

You can’t work around bad content and just place it within a different kind of HTML format essentially and assume that suddenly this lower quality content or bad content would be seen as more important by the search engine algorithms.  So I think it’s important to set expectations there.

So while AMP definitely has its advantages, such as the premium carousel placements on mobile, it isn’t a quick fix for other site issues that are causing the site to not rank as well in Google.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post
Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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