Google Docs On Removing AMP Content From Search

Google has added a new developer document page on removing AMP content from search. This was first spotted by Kenichi Suzuki, he posted it on Twitter.

I guess enough people asked, Google finally made a document telling webmasters the safe way to remove your AMP content.

There are three, maybe four, ways to remove your AMP content from showing in search. If you have a CMS provider, you can use their built in tools to remove it. If not, here are the three methods Google lists on how you can remove your AMP content from showing in search.

Method 1: Remove AMP from Google Search

Use this method to remove your AMP pages from Google Search without displaying an error to the user.

1. Remove the rel="amphtml" link from the canonical page in the source code.
2. Configure your server to return either an HTTP 301 Moved Permanently or 302 Found response for the removed AMP page.
3. Configure a redirect from the removed AMP page to the canonical page.
4. Verify the removal of your AMP page by searching for your content using Google Search. To verify removal of a large number of AMP pages, use the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) report.

Method 2: Remove AMP from Google Search and non-Google platforms

Use this method to remove your AMP page from Google Search and Google AMP Cache while keeping permalinks to the removed pages.

1. Remove the rel="amphtml" link from your canonical page's HTML source.
2. Add a 'noindex' header or noindex meta tag to prevent Googlebot from crawling your AMP pages.
3. Submit an updated sitemap through the Google Search Console or using the Webmaster Tools API that excludes your AMP pages.
4. Verify the removal of your AMP page by searching for your content using Google Search. To verify removal of a large number of AMP pages, use Search Console AMP report.
5. Remove your AMP page so that it is no longer accessible.
6. Configure your server to send an HTTP 404 Not Found for your removed AMP page to Google user-agents, such as Googlebot. This will ensure that Google AMP Cache does not serve stale content to other platforms.
7. If you want to keep permalinks active, configure your server to send an HTTP 301 Redirect for your removed AMP page to your canonical page.

Method 3: Stop serving AMP from Google Search as quickly as possible

1. Delete the AMP page from your server.
2. Ensure your server returns a HTTP 404 Not Found response for the deleted file.
3. Remove the rel="amphtml" link from canonical page's HTML source for each AMP page that you deleted in step 1.
4. Ask Google to recrawl the canonical page.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 for each AMP page that you want to remove.

I am not suggesting you remove AMP. There are no signs of Google slowing down their AMP efforts and promotion.

Forum discussion at Twitter.