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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

Oh? So how do I get into the AMP carousel on Google search without implementing AMP on my site?

This is a major ranking factor, in some situations moving sites that would be on page 13! to the #1 spot in search. In other cases, the effect is less visible.

That is what keeps people from not implementing AMP.

And you get this ranking benefit not for using AMP, or for a certain performance, but it is given to everyone that uses Google’s AMP version, from Google’s CDN, with Google’s tracking solutions. If I want to run AMP from my own CDN, I can’t do it, and if I want to avoid Google’s cache, because I have my own CDN, I also don’t get the ranking boost.

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> If I want to run AMP from my own CDN, I can’t do it

Got a source for that? I always heard that the criteria for the carousel was AMP-compatibility, not being hosted on Google's CDN.

There is no direct source, but you can try it, or just look at the current implementation.

Currently, Google serves AMP by serving all AMP search results from its own cache, which allows Google to add features such as the header bar, or the swiping between carousel elements. This doesn’t work if the pages are from different origins.

EDIT: I found some sources:

> contain a <script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> tag inside their head tag.

https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec#required-mark...

Which prevents self-hosting the JS

And https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq

> Q: Can I stop content from being cached?

> A: No. By using the AMP format, content producers are making the content in AMP files available to be cached by third parties. For example, Google products use the Google AMP Cache to serve AMP content as fast as possible.

> Q: Can I stop content from being cached?

How different is this from common HTML caching done all over the web? And that's about using the Google AMP Cache, not about using AMP.

And you still didn't provide a source about "having to use Google's CDN".

Essentially: do AMP pages hosted on Cloudflare's cache do not get into Google Search carrousel?

> How different is this from common HTML caching done all over the web? And that's about using the Google AMP Cache, not about using AMP.

> And you still didn't provide a source about "having to use Google's CDN".

This is the issue I meant with Google’s CDN/Cache.

If a user clicks a link to an AMP page in Google search, they are not redirected to your page. They ALWAYS get the cached version from Google, and Google modifies your page by adding UI, and changing other functionality (for example, the left/right swipe gestures are changed to navigate to other Google search results).

You can not opt out of this while still appearing in the carousel.

The answer to your question is no: google's search results only ever link to google's cache for your page.

Link here:

https://blog.branch.io/google-accelerated-mobile-pages-amp-a...

> Anyone can use a CDN to set up and run an AMP cache, but only content in Google’s cache (which Google has stated can be used without restriction and at no cost) is currently getting preferred search results treatment

But the whole point is kinda moot because AMP requires that your assets be "cacheable", which means google will come along and cache them, and the search results will use the google-cached version.

So sure, another CDN could cache your stuff, but nobody clicking through a google search result will ever hit it.

I don't have a "source", but that is accurate from what I was told by the team behind AMP. In order to make it into carousel, AMP content has to be served from Google cache.

https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/

Cloudflare Serves as a AMP CDN

And yet, you only get a ranking boost if you allow Google to cache your page on their CDN. You can not run your own modified version of the AMP js, or run AMP’s js from your servers, or opt out of being cached by Google’s CDN and get the ranking boost.

To quote the AMP specs, a page is only eligible for showing up as AMP in search if it

> contains a <script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> tag inside their head tag.

and

> is allowed to be cached in the Google AMP cache

Could you show us some examples of AMP sites served from Cloudflare (and not the Google AMP cache) that show up in the Google AMP carousel and get the AMP logo in the Google search results?

The burden is on you to prove that they don't.

How can I prove a negative?

I can only point to what the Google AMP documentation says, where they state that you have to allow your site to be served by Google AMP Cache to count as an AMP site: https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq and https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp

Maybe they don't follow their own docs and there are sites out there not cached in the Google AMP Cache that still get placed in the carousel. I have no way to prove that without being able to test every single possible search term (plus all the other variables like location which affect the results).

The wording is that you have to allow you page (not site) to be cached by any CDN.

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