Mobile Site Domain/URL Structure
-
We are currently building a mobile optimised version of our main website and I had some questions with regard to SEO.
1. Is it best to structure the domain as:
yourdomain/m
2. It is correct to place rel="cannonical" on the mobile pages and to have only the main site indexed?
Thanks in advance and links or books on mobile seo you can direct me to that would be greatly appreciated.
Phil
-
As Adam suggests, responsive design seems to be the preferred route at the moment.
This is different in that you have a single URL for everything. Whatever platform the end-user users all content is sent to their browser and then it is rendered differently for different devices.
This requires a slightly different mindset as you are effectively building one version of a site, but changing the way it appears to different users. Therefore, if you want a "stripped down" version of the site then it is best done by serving up different navigation.
However - if you are committed to desktop/mobile versions of the site and they are utilising the same content then I would use a canonical from teh mobile to the desktop site. I think that the domain choice is pretty subjective. I'd prefer m.domain as it is less likely to get confused with your overall site structure.
However, if you are not yet committed down one path and the intention is to serve the same content - definitely look at the responsive option.
-
I think you may find this helpful: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Domain Types/Extensions – Are .infos any good ?
Hi I know general concensus is to stay away from the non established domain suffix types and concentrate on .coms .co.uk’s etc etc. But i have an aged .info domain that has some content on it related to a online news paper i have on that subject (on the news paper providers domain sub-folder currently) which i want to focus more time on and put on its own dedicated domain. So i want to upload it to this aged .info domain. However waste of time if .info domains are bad for seo etc Does anyone have any experience of .info doing well in serps or should i totally scrap the idea and try find a new .com etc type domain ? My .info has been live with related content for 7 years so hoping that should count for something 🙂 All Best
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
Dan0 -
Mobile site not ranking
Hello, I have a m.site.com version of my original site. It is about 1/10 the size, and no matter what I do-I can't get the site to rank. I've added more pages and specified canonical etc etc. Should I add as many pages as my larger site has? Are there specific places I should be submitting this version beyond the typical? I am at a loss, so any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks! L
Technical SEO | | lfrazer1 -
URL Changes And Site Map Redirects
We are working on a site redesign which will change/shorten our url structure. The primary domain will remain the same however most of the other urls on the site are getting much simpler. My question is how should this be best handled when it comes to sitemaps because there are massive amounts of URLS that will be redirected to the new shorter URL how should we best handle our sitemaps? Should a new sitemap be submitted right at launch? and the old sitemap removed later. I know that Google does not like having redirects in sitemaps. Has anyone done this on a large scale, 60k URLs or more and have any advice?
Technical SEO | | RMATVMC0 -
How to handle mobile site with less pages than the main site?
We are developing a mobile version of our website that will utilize responsive design/dynamic serving. About 70% of the main website will be included in the mobile version. What (if anything) should be the redirect for pages not included in the mobile version of the site? Also - for one specific section users will be redirected from that page to the homepage, what is the redirect that should be used for this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Keywords based domains redirecting to a site.. is it SPAM?
Keywords based domains redirecting to a site is considered spam isn't it ? And if yes, then is it considered spam in all cases whether those domain based sites are related or non related to main site?
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Getting Rid of Duplicate Page Titles After URL Structure Change
I've had all sorts of issues with google when they just dropped us on our head a few weeks ago. Google is crawling again after I made some changes, but they're still not ranking our content like they were so I have a few questions. I changed our url structure from /year/month/date/post-title to just /post-title and 301 redirected the old link structure to the new. When I look I see over 3000 duplicate title errors listing both versions of the url. 1. How do I get google to crawl the old url structure and recognize the 301 redirect and update the index? 2. Google is crawling the site again, but they're not ranking us like they were before. We're in a highly competitive category and I'm aware of that, but we've always been an authority in our niche. We have plenty of quality backlinks and often we're originators of the content which is then rewritten by a trillion websites everywhere. We're not the best at writing and titles, but we're working on it and this did not matter much to google previously as it was ranking us pretty highly on the front page and certainly ranking us over many sites that are ranking above us today. Some backlinks http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/dajaz1.com A few examples - if you google twista gucci louis prada you'll see many of the sites who trackbacked to us since we premiered the song rank much higher than us. 3 weeks ago we were ranking above them. http://dajaz1.com/twista-gucci-louis-prada/ google search jadakiss consignment mixtape 3 weeks ago we were ranking higher than all 4 sites ranking above us. The sites ranking above us even link to us or mention us, yet they rank above us now. original content here http://dajaz1.com/watch-jadakiss-confirms-cosignment-mixtape-2012-schedule/ I could throw out a ton of examples like this. How do we get google to rank us again. It should be noted that I'm not using any SEO plugin's on the site. I hand coded what's in there, and I know I can probably do it better so any tips or ideas is welcome. I'm pretty sure that our issues were caused by the Yoast SEO Plugin as when I search site:dajaz1.com the pages and topics that display were all indexed while the plugin was active. I've since removed it and all calls to it in the database, but I'm pretty nervous about plugins right now. Which brings me to my third and final question How do I get rid of the page category and topic pages that were indexed and seem to be ranking higher than the rest of our content? I lied one more. For category url I've set it to remove the category base so the url is dajaz1.com/news or dajaz1.com/music is that preferable or is this causing me issues? Any feedback is appreciated. Also google is crawling again (see attached image) but the Kilobytes downloaded per day hasn't. Should I be concerned about this? Gd9i6
Technical SEO | | malady0 -
We have been keeping other sites on our domain while we build them for clients and not taking them off afterwards
So when I look in wmt its telling me our site is about fish oil etc when we are web designers. We have blocked these pages in robots text and removed them. WMT is showing 500 errors in crawl errors and telling us we have health issues on our site. what should we do and how do i bulk select these errors is wmt to mark as fixed (if they are fixed)
Technical SEO | | duncan2740 -
Prevent mobile site from appearing in the sitelinks of desktop search
Hi, IWe have this mobile page that keeps on appearing in the google search. I even try to put it in the robots.txt to disallow the crawler but still it keeps on popping on the search results. How can I prevent it from displaying?
Technical SEO | | shebinhassan0