Is it bad from an SEO perspective that cached AMP pages are hosted on domains other than the original publisher's?

[Brian_Dowd]

Hello Moz,

I am thinking about starting to utilize AMP for some of my website. I've been researching this AMP situation for the better part of a year and I am still unclear on a few things.

What I am primarily concerned with in terms of AMP and SEO is whether or not the original publisher gets credit for the traffic to a cached AMP page that is hosted elsewhere. I can see the possible issues with this from an SEO perspective and I am pretty sure I have read about how SEOs are unhappy about this particular aspect of AMP in other places.

On the AMP project FAQ page you can find this, but there is very little explanation:

"Do publishers receive credit for the traffic from a measurement perspective?
Yes, an AMP file is the same as the rest of your site – this space is the publisher’s canvas."

So, let's say you have an AMP page on your website example.com:
example.com/amp_document.html

And a cached copy is served with a URL format similar to this: https://google.com/amp/example.com/amp_document.html

Then how does the original publisher get the credit for the traffic? Is it because there is a canonical tag from the AMP version to the original HTML version?

Also, while I am at it, how does an AMP page actually get into Google's AMP Cache (or any other cache)? Does Google crawl the original HTML page, find the AMP version and then just decide to cache it from there? Are there any other issues with this that I should be aware of?

Thanks

[Brian_Dowd]

Thanks Martijn. I figured that was probably the answer, however, there seemed to be some hubbub over this issue, so I was wondering if there are any other issues regarding AMP pages being hosted elsewhere.

Do you have any insight you could share in that regard?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Brian,

Well, the AMP page will have a canonical URL leading back to the original page. This will take care of the credits to the original page.

Martijn.