We dropped AMP on a news site in mid 2024. All /amp/ URLs 301 to the canonical article. Fine, standard.
Pulled logs for August and Googlebot smartphone made about 140k requests to /amp/ URLs. That’s roughly 22% of all its hits on the site. Most are to articles from 2019-2022.
Things I checked:
– no internal links to /amp/ anywhere
– not in any sitemap
– redirects are single-hop 301s, response time under 100ms
My guess is it’s just recrawling URLs it knows about, and old external links and aggregators keep feeding them. It isn’t breaking anything but it’s crawl activity that isn’t going to new stories.
Would you:
1. leave the redirects and wait it out
2. switch them to 410 since the redirect targets are indexed anyway
3. something else
I’m nervous about 410 because some of those AMP URLs have links. Anyone been through this with AMP or another old URL pattern?
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