Is there an advantage to submitting my AMP pages to my Google sitemap?
I am using <link rel="amphtml" ... but I was wondering if submitting them lead to faster discovery?
My AMP pages are starting to show up in Google Search Console Coverage for "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap"
However, I cannot confirm that their non-AMP canonicals are in the latest version of the sitemap that Google has crawled and parsed.
And the Google has spoken!!
Despite lots of conflicting information on the web, and lots of articles insisting that there is no need to submit AMP pages to your sitemap, this Google article definitively says to submit AMP pages to your sitemap.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/create-URLs
Keep in mind that it's often the case that the left hand doesn't speak to the right hand with these sorts of things. In other words, just because Google's SEO team is putting out documents like this, doesn't mean that their quality search team thinks differently.
And the Great Google has spoiken again! This time on a page that the last page linked to, with completely the opposite information. Did I call it, or what?!
So the page I linked to in my post right above says that the types of URLs you provide in your sitemaps include two types:
Then there's a link for more information.
Somehow I end up at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668 which specifically says to list only canonical URLs in sitemaps.
Ah, but there it is!! You're supposed to annotate the sitemap URL with its alternate:
https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/separate-urls#annotation-in-sitemaps
Let's see if I can figure out how to do this for my AMP pages.
OK, I'm now adding AMP pages to my sitemap file as so:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<url>
<loc>https://www.daniweb.com/programming/software-development/threads/105/visual-basic-net</loc>
<lastmod>2002-08-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>never</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
<xhtml:link rel="amphtml" href="https://www.daniweb.com/programming/software-development/threads/105/visual-basic-net/amp" />
</url>
</urlset>I also stumbled upon a tweet by John Mu (Google's rep to the SEO community, for those not in the know) insisting that they don't need AMP pages in sitemap files.
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