Not Creating AMP Pages?

Does anyone know how long it typically takes for Google News to begin recognizing & indexing AMP pages once this plug-in is activated? Any information anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated. ??

Useful to read through the AMP website info on what AMP actually is and does, and test/validate your /amp/ rendered posts with Google’s checking tool.

Google will “see” you have AMP pages once they are working and once they respider your content from your sitemap updates. You’ll then eventually see the notice from Google Webmaster Tools/Search Console that you “should optimize your AMP pages…” (and you will get an email), and then it will start to show stuff like 1,050 pages indexed, 127 with errors.

So, first steps are
a) install plugin and make sure your post works for
yoursite/postname/amp/
b) check your post with the Google amp validation tool
c) if (a) doesn’t work … hint: fix it!
d) wait for Google to “see” you’re “amp ready”
e) once the amp pages are in your search console account, you will be able to see errors for non-indexed posts

In our case the pages generating errors are “old” ones which seem to have some bad HTML “align=”” elements including the stupid wordpress center tag, which should really be a CLASS for the modern world.

HINT: create a centered text class and don’t ever use the p align=”center” if you want those pages to pass validation.

Thank you, Neotrope; I appreciate your taking the time to respond.

I’ve been able to confirm, as you suggested, that the pages are being created via the /amp/ rendering. And, I have checked on the AMP site and read … just having a hard time understanding a lot of it.

The response I get when I “validate” is that GN does not see any AMP pages generated. That is why I am concerned, and I don’t see anything on the AMP pages that addresses specifically the issue of time lapse, from when the AMP feature is activated and when they can be expected to start “finding” pages. I just know our being “found” in GN has dropped dramatically, and it is really alarming.

And, again, I appreciate your responding; I guess right now we’re just kinda stuck in a “hold” pattern until they “find” us via AMP … sigh.

Hey TVRuckus, with Google they take their time updating that on Google Webmaster Tools. It can take 3-4 days for the AMP pages to being showing up as Indexed on there.

If you are using Google Analytics real time, you will know if your pages are showing up in AMP when looking at the Top Referrals section as you’ll see cdn.ampproject as a source of traffic.

That’s been our way of knowing that our pages were indexed even though they weren’t showing it in Webmaster Tools.

Guys,

Thanks for sharing your knowledge on this thread, has been a tremendous help. Much appreciated.

This has been so simple I want to make sure I am not missing something. I installed the plugin last night, added /amp/ to post URL and got 404 error. Today, added /amp/ to same post URL and the page loads.

Just want to confirm that I do not have to manually edit the URL/permalink structure: Can it be this simple?

https://resourcerental.com/temporary-fencing-omaha-in-ne/amp/

I also added ‘#development=1’ per this article from AMP project, and page loads:
https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/create/preview_and_validate.html
When I validate via Google amp validation tool, there are no errors. But I do get this “Google Maps API warning: SensorNotRequired https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/error-messages#sensor-not-required”

Also, at some point in future, do you foresee /amp/ being applied to pages? Or is the nature of AMP only news worthy content, hence emphasis on posts only?

When you check for validation with the development add on, make sure you do the right click (in Chrome) Inspect and then check the Console section which will tell you if it’s AMP validated.

With AMP (Google doesn’t say this) you have to pass a 2 Tier validation for your articles to get indexed in AMP. The first one is via the Google Structured Data Tool and the other is through Google Development Console.

You can make sure to resave your permalinks (just hit the Save button again) as some people are finding that to help.

The biggest step (and what we learned the hard way) is the Google Development Console validation because that is the big barrier to having your articles get into AMP.

Another big thing to know is that Google takes their sweet time when indexing and showing errors that may be keeping them from indexing your articles so if you fix errors, expect a 3-4 day period for it to reflect that in Google Webmaster Tools.

gooma2, thanks for quick reply, and insight.

I definitely “Inspect”ed correctly and checked console. I resaved via Settings and Updated post, (thank you) then refeshed browser and opened a new one, then “Inspect” again and am still getting this message, nothing else: “Google Maps API warning: SensorNotRequired https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/error-messages#sensor-not-required”

I ran the Structured Data Tool and am not sure what I should be looking for?

Per your note on “the biggest step” of Google Development Console, could it be that I haven’t given it enough time, for Google to “catch up?”

Thanks again.

the Google Development Console will let you know right away if your link (with the amp & #development=1). That’s where in Chrome, you will open your page and right click on Inspect element and then go to Consol tab.

If all is good, it will state AMP validation successful. Otherwise, it will state what the error is.

With Google Structured Data Tool, it will tell you if there are any errors and what they and where they are. If all is good, it will give green light (literally) and say ‘Good’. The Data Tool is the easy tier to pass. The Data Tool will have 2 windows open. One the left will be your source code and on the right it will show if there are any issues.

Also, in the Google Webmaster Tools under the AMP section, you will be able to see what articles have errors (if any) and what they are. As it may take several days for Google to acknowledge the fixes, you can check those pages in the Development Console to see they do have errors or not.

It’s a little frustrating I know as sites are pretty much required to jump ASAP when Google makes a chance, but we’re at their mercy when it comes time for them to see that we did it right.

As for specific errors, there are going to be so many with people as they will come from older plugins, older browsers and whatever else so trying to pinpoint exactly what is causing it can be a time-consuming venture. We brought in a developer since it was doing my head in with the errors getting thrown from our Livefyre and Related Posts plugin.

I can see why you’d bring in a developer dedicated to this.

Ran the Google Structured Data Tool (https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/) and I see the two columns. In 2 separate instances I entered source code and URL on left, “Fetched” and “Validated.”

Under “Results,” I don’t see a green light, or any color light. Only lines of text like this:
pmr-metatags-article_modified_time
pmr-metatags-article_modified_time-00
pmr-metatags-article_modified_time-03
pmr-metatags-article_modified_time-04t17
pmr-metatags-article_modified_time-2016
pmr-metatags-article_modified_time-2016-03-04t17

Could I be having a Schema issue?

I’m glad we started this link here; it was beginning to seem like we were the only ones w/ frustrations … LOL … I hope this thread helps someone else as much as it has helped us.

Just to report: We now have 15 indexed articles, each showing zero errors, so hoping we are starting down a good path on AMP.

Gooma2, that “two-tier” information was enlightening. As far as the developer … excellent idea, but whether or not we will be able to afford that option is another matter altogether. But, on the other hand, w/ stuff like this, can one ultimately afford NOT to access that option?

Hey Pauliee

The results show on the right hand side and if there is no problem, you’ll see green ‘All good’ with a checkmark next to categories like:

hcard
NewsArticle (if you have a news site)
Organization
Breadcrumb

Here’s an example of one of our articles from today that checked out fine so you can see what I mean by the All good stuff.

https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool?url=https%253A%252F%252Fmovietvtechgeeks.com%252Fkardashian-curse-caught-kanye-west%252F

TVRuckus:
When I heard about this back in October I knew Google would be pushing it on everyone (not just news sites like us) so we brought in our guy to start in December, but then slowly we were finding out that there were so many things Google wasn’t telling the smaller (when I say smaller I mean if you aren’t the NY Times or CNN) sites so it kept tripping us up when we thought we had checked out fine.

It wasn’t until asking on the Google Publishing forum about all of the errors that we suddenly got that we learned about the 2-Tier system. The hardest part is if you make an error then it’ll take 3-4 days for it show up in Google Webmaster Tools so then you fix it and the it takes another 3-4 days for Google to recognize it.

If we knew it wasn’t going to be quickly adapted by people (faster page loads, of course!) we wouldn’t have spend nearly $1K on a developer, but at this point when I’m seeing how many issues people are encountering it was well worth it. I’d rather spend my time editing my writers work rather than having my brain get the mushy feeling not knowing what the heck is going on.

If you have a program that does any In-Text links (like Related Posts) this may throw some rel= errors as AMP isn’t really ready for that yet. LiveFyre is also an SSL issue as their Favicon (tiny logo) is still on HTTP and I’ve e-mailed them several times about it, but they are in no rush to change that so you may have to tweak for that in AMP too.

If you are noticing any errors are relating to a plugin, definitely e-mail the developer as some have no clue about the issues or even thought there would be one. We use WP Rocket (over W3TC) and they use a DNS Prefetch that threw errors.

They didn’t anticipate that and Google, of course, didn’t give much heads up to developers, but they immediately made a quick tweak and everything is all good.

While the news media and Google love claiming that all you have to do is just download and install the AMP plugin and it’s easy peezy…as we know, it’s not the case for everyone.

I did try PageFrog as I love the look that this plugin gives the AMP (along with allowing you to format it better) but there’s something in it that caused Google to deindex every one of my AMP indexed links.

What was odd was that our new articles would direct to AMP, but our older articles would go back to their original link and not forward.

Our developer couldn’t even figure it out but within 3 days of installing PageFrog our AMP indexed links began dropping. We deactivated the Yoast AMP Glue to see if that caused issues, but it was PageFrog sadly enough.

After 4 days of deactivating that plugin, our AMP indexed links jumped right back to the thousands letting us know that the problem plugin for us. I’m just hoping others are watching their AMP section in Google Webmaster Tools because this is where you learn what’s really working and isn’t.

Need help,
I’m using AMP 0.4.2 from Automattic, WordPress 4.7, Woocommerce 2.6.9 on OnePage’s 1.15 Theme from Iografica. So, when installing the AMP plugin, it would make a copy of every page of the site in the /amp version, but that’s not what happened. I even managed to do a minimal color setting and I can see the page /amp simulation inside the panel but when on any page I try to add /amp in the url of the site it returns that page can not be found.
I already tried to disable and reactivate the plugin but nothing happened, is there any action I have to do to make it create the /amp pages?