When you publish your AMP products, Shop Sheriff generates an AMP page and adds AMP to every single one of your product pages. You may have hundreds, or even thousands of products, and you may notice in Google Search Console that not every one of these products is actually indexed on AMP. This is completely normal and in this article we'll explain why this happens and how to maximize the number of AMP pages you can have indexed.
The most common reason that Google doesn't AMP-index all of your products
If you notice that you have hundreds of products, but only a small percentage of them are indexed as AMP pages, this is almost always because Google isn't crawling your "regular" pages. This is not something that AMP has any effect on, since we don't modify the original site. But it is something that you might want to fix, by doing certain things like updating your product descriptions to be unique (more on this below).
For example, if you have 1,000 products, but these products are very similar in their product descriptions, or if these products are from a dropshipping or print-on-demand service, it's very likely that Google won't crawl these pages and deem them quality enough to be indexed on AMP.
When you publish your AMP products with our app, we add AMP to every single one of your products, to maximize the chances of being indexed. However, if you have a very low trafficked site, or many products that are similar, it's very likely Google won't be crawling your site very often, and therefore the number of AMP indexed pages will be low.
It's worth understanding how AMP indexing works, and below we'll discuss some ways to maximize your chances of being AMP indexed.
How does AMP indexing work?
When you publish your AMP pages (products, for example), here's how indexing works:
- Shop Sheriff generates an AMP version of this page, with a unique AMP URL, which you can access at any time by adding /a/s/ in front of your Shopify product page URL, such as
mysite.com/a/s/products/my-product-handle - Shop Sheriff adds a single <link rel="amphtml"> meta tag to the top of the corresponding original (non-AMP) Shopify page, which tells Google and other crawlers that you have an AMP HTML version of this page.
- That's it, that's everything that Google officially recommends to make your AMP pages discoverable by Google, and AMP by Shop Sheriff does this all automatically.
- Next, when Google crawls your corresponding original (non-AMP) page, they'll see the <link rel="amphtml"> tag, and often they will index the AMP version of that page. It's not guaranteed that they index the AMP version of the page, just like it's not guaranteed that Google indexes the original version of the page, but this is everything that Google recommends, and it's exactly what AMP by Shop Sheriff does.
How many pages should I expect to see indexed on AMP?
This number varies widely, and it is entirely dependent upon these factors:
- How many original (non-AMP) pages Google is crawling weekly for your site.
- How unique your brand's content is, and how favorable Google sees your website. For example, if you run a dropshipping store, or a store that sells the same products as several other stores online, you may see a very low number of pages indexed on Google.
As this number varies widely, we often see the most common range of indexed AMP pages within 20-80% of your total products, but other SEO or brand factors can make this range higher or lower.
What does Shop Sheriff do to make my pages discoverable by Google?
Shop Sheriff does everything that Google officially recommends to make your AMP pages discoverable by Google. We generate valid AMP pages, and we put the associated <link rel="amphtml"> tag at the top of each page, so that you have the most probability of having the maximum amount of AMP pages indexed. This is how every AMP page across the web allows itself to be discoverable, and is exactly the perfect method to use.
How can I optimize my chances of being AMP indexed?
Use unique product descriptions
The absolute best way to optimize your chances of being AMP indexed is to make sure each of your products is using unique product descriptions, and/or product descriptions that other websites online are not using. For example, if you are a dropshipping store using an app like Oberlo in which product descriptions are imported into your shop, you will want to make sure you alter the product descriptions to add some unique content. Videos, images, or unique paragraphs are great, and these tell Google that you're not just like every other site online, so Google sees you as a more favorable site to index.
As another example, if you are not a dropshipping store but you have a lot of similar products on your website, you will want to make sure you differentiate product descriptions between each product. If you sell handbags and you have separate products for a blue/black/white/tan handbag, Google may or may not index each of these pages unless you add some other kind of differentiating text to your product description and product titles. Google doesn't like it when many pages are almost identical in their descriptions.
This tip of using unique product descriptions also improves your chances of being indexed on your regular pages, not just AMP pages. Often people don't realize that they might have 500 or 1000 products, but only 50 of them are even indexed by Google. Adding unique product descriptions is absolutely essential to maximizing your pages for discovery across all search engines.
Re-submit your sitemap to Google Search Console
By resubmitting your sitemap to Google Search Console, this often triggers Google to do a more comprehensive scan of your website, and in a few days, index more pages. It's not guaranteed to work, but we recommend this. You do not need to submit a separate AMP sitemap, as Google does not recommend submitting AMP pages in a sitemap. Instead, you submit your standard Shopify sitemap, and that is perfect.
Wait a little longer
It takes Google time to crawl your website and therefore time to have the potential of indexing AMP pages. If you recently published your AMP pages, we recommend waiting 2-7 days to begin seeing AMP pages indexed. The number will gradually rise before it levels out within 1-4 weeks. If you have a very highly trafficked website, this process may take as little as a few days. If you have a very new or low-trafficked website, this may take upwards of a month or more. Again, it's all dependent upon how fast Google crawls your site, which AMP does not control. New sites inherently take a lot longer to crawl.
I followed all the recommendations, but I still have a very low number of AMP pages indexed.
When this happens, it's because Google isn't actually crawling your original (non-AMP) pages. This can be due to many external factors, such as a malfunctioning theme, or a malfunctioning SEO app. What you will want to do is make sure that Google is actually crawling your original (non-AMP) pages, and this can be verified using Google Search Console. We have a great tutorial on how to verify how often your pages are being crawled here. Please note that AMP doesn't affect how many original (non-AMP) pages Google is crawling, so this is unfortunately a product of something else on your site, most commonly due to a malfunctioning theme or SEO app. In this case we recommend contacting both your theme developer and any SEO app or professional that you might be using.