Cloudflare's AMP cache is even worse. If someone goes to a website behind/rehosted on Cloudflares AMP that has a link from that site to a third party site (say, yours or mine) that third party site will be spidered and also rehosted on Cloudflare AMP.
Then when someone goes to the intentionally Cloudflare AMP site and clicks through to your site your actual domain never gets the hit. Instead all traffic remains within Cloudflare and you never see it.
Additionally, after 2 months of trying to contact anyone at Cloudflare about this exact situation happening with the most popular page on my domain (saw the cloudflare AMP bot in the logs) I still can't get a real person. Their support is attrocious.
Then when someone goes to the intentionally Cloudflare AMP site and clicks through to your site your actual domain never gets the hit. Instead all traffic remains within Cloudflare and you never see it.
Sounds pretty nice, no? Where can I sign up to reduce my hosting bill?
That still doesn’t give you any of the ranking boost – that is only given if you allow Google to cache it on their CDN. Google does that by default, you likely don’t even notice it, but if you try to prevent it, you lose the ranking boost.
Can you provide a reference where it says that there is rank boost for AMP sites. AFAIK if you're site is fast it will get some boost only in mobile. But it doesn't need to be an amp site. Gurdian for example runs their own AMP cache.
Pages that use AMP get a massive indirect ranking boost. Yes, they don’t get directly boosted, but they get added to the AMP carousel, between the ads and the #1 result, or between the #1 and #2 result. If, for a given search term, none of the top pages have an AMP result, Google will boost the first 3-4 pages that have an AMP result to this place – even if they’d organically rank on page 10 or later. In some situations, I’ve seen results from page 13 boosted to #1.
For example, none of the newspapers reporting about stuff where I live support AMP, but a few US newspapers that report about sports events that happened years ago do.
So when I search about stuff in my city, at the top there’s an AMP carousel with news from years ago, and below that only the actual results.
The news carousel is all AMP just by chance and ranks higher in the page than the results; arguing semantics over the meaning of ranking is irrelevant if the most clicked thing is always AMP.
That is the same result. I want to prevent Google (or anyone but the user’s browser addons and me) from modifying the UI of the page, adding any UI, swipe gestures, or from caching it.
How can I do that AND get the same spot in Google search?