Does non-critical AMP errors prevent you from being featured on Top Stories Carousel?

[Starcom_Search]

Consider site A which is a news publishing site that has valid AMP pages with non-critical AMP pages (as notified within Search Console). Also, Site A publishes news articles from site B (its partner site) and posts it on site A which have AMP pages too but most of them are not valid AMP pages with critical AMP errors.

For brand terms like Economic Times, it does show a top stories carousel for all articles published by Economic Times, however it doesn't look the same for site A (inspite of it having valid AMP pages).

Image link: http://tinypic.com/r/219bh9j/9

Now that there are valid AMP pages from site A and invalid AMP pages from site B on site A, there have been instances wherein a news article from site A features on the top stories carousel on Desktop for a certain query whereas it doesn't feature on the mobile SERPs in spite of the page being a valid AMP page. For example, as mentioned in the screenshot below: Business Today ranks on the Top Stories carousel for a term like “jio news” on Desktop, but on Mobile although the page is a valid AMP page, it doesn’t show as an AMP page within the Top Stories Carousel.

Image Link: http://tinypic.com/r/11sc8j6/9

There have been some cases where although the page is featured on the top carousel on desktop, the same article doesn't show up on the mobile version for the same query on the Top Stories Carousel.

What could be the reason behind this? Also, would it be necessary to solve both critical and non-critical errors on site A (including those published from site B on site A)?

[bridget.randolph]

Hey! I have a few questions first of all, just to clarify the situation.

1. has Site A always published the articles from Site B? How do you currently handle the duplicate content aspect?

2. Has Site A's valid AMP content previously performed as expected, and this is a new issue? Or have you always had this issue?

3. Are you verified in Google News?

4. Are you seeing errors in Google Search Console for any of these AMP pages?

[Starcom_Search]

1. Yes, Site A republishes content from Site B on a daily basis as Site A has an exclusive partnership with Site B for republication (with site B being the parent publisher). To address content duplication errors we use the original-source tag to point towards the articles present on site B.

2. Yes, it performed well a couple of months ago until the non-critical errors started building up recently. One of them being "Use of deprecated tags or attributes". Also, as mentioned previously, AMP pages site A has non-critical errors and AMP pages from site B have critical as well as non-critical errors.

3. Yes.

4. Yes. Site A has about 15,000+ Indexed AMP pages, 4000+ Critical AMP Errors and 22,000+ non-critical AMP errors.

[bridget.randolph]

Thanks for this!

2 things:

1. I'd suggest that if Site A republishes duplicate (syndicated) content from Site B and references Site B as the original source, you might want to consider simply blocking that content from search engines (on Site A). This will ensure that Google doesn't penalize for dupe content and also will prevent them from seeing the critical errors on the Site B AMP pages.

2. Overall I've tested your example page and couldn't find anything seriously wrong, but one thing I did notice was that in your structured data markup (NewsArticle) you have an error:

On the page: http://m.businesstoday.in/lite/story/reliance-jio-is-preparing-new-tariffs-and-exciting-offers-for-you/1/249662.html

You list "mainEntityOfPage" as "http://m.businesstoday.in/"

However, the Google guidelines state that "mainEntityOfPage" should be the canonical URL of the article page: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/articles#type_definitions (in this case: http://www.businesstoday.in/sectors/telecom/reliance-jio-is-preparing-new-tariffs-and-exciting-offers-for-you/story/249662.html)

Although the markup does pass the structured data testing tool validation, it is possible that this is breaking the structured data and using NewsArticle markup is something that Google states you must have implemented to feature in the News Carousel.

If fixing this doesn't help, I'd suggest cleaning up the non-critical errors next to see if that fixes the issue.