If a page is noindexed, but includes a meta reference to an AMP version, is this a mixed signal?
Is the AMP version checked to see if it’s noindexed as well? Are there situations where you would want to index the AMP version but not the desktop version? Is Google even willing to index an alternate version of a URL when the primary version is noindexed?
Not sure if it was the right call or not, but instead of noindexing the AMP version of noindexed desktop pages, I instead removed the AMP version of noindexed pages completely, such that they now 404.
And, hours later, made another change. I’m 301 redirecting to non-AMP versions instead of 404’ing.
I wish there was a definitive answer on what to do here.
When a URL for an AMP Page is noindex, it directly instructs search engines not to index the page, preventing it from appearing in search results. This negates the purpose of developing AMP sites in the first place because AMP is intended to be accessed through search results.
As we all know, for AMP URLs to appear in search results, they must be indexable.
I overcome this same situation by removing any noindex directives from AMP pages by checking the HTML and the HTTP header before doing so.
Hello. Thank you for your reply, but you failed to answer my question.
(1) I know that when pages are noindexed, search engines are instructed not to index the page. (2) I also know that AMP pages are intended to be accessed through search results.
My question was, given those two things, would it hurt a site's overall Google rankings if an AMP page is noindexed?
In other words, imagine a site has 100 articles. Each of those articles has an AMP version. Now imagine that I want to noindex 10 of those articles. Should I also noindex the 10 AMP pages for those articles? Or should the 10 noindexed articles not even have AMP pages at all? That's the question.
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