Mobile or Responsive canonical question?
-
Hi guys
We are in the process of expanding and are moving our site to magento enterprise. Today we met with a company pitching a seperate mobile site. While Im al for a mobile site in terms of look and user experience, from an seo point i dont believe and "m." domain is the best idea.
However if we were to go with a mobile site, would adding canonical tags to the mobile urls pointing to the desktop urls be useful?
For example m.trespass.co.uk/category-page has the canonical tag pointing to trespass.co.uk/category-page
Im looking for someone who has direct experience wth this situation for one of their clients.
Thanks
Robert
-
Hi Robert,
In my experience, going for responsive design is always the best option. m. sites can work but they don't make sense is responsive is an option.
Take a look here in regards to your canonical query: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details
Let me know if that helps!
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
-
Canonical error from Google
Moz couldn't explain this properly and I don't understand how to fix it. Google emailed this morning saying "Alternate page with proper canonical tag." Moz also kinda complains about the main URL and the main URL/index.html being duplicate. Of course they are. The main URL doesn't work without the index.html page. What am I missing? How can I fix this to eliminate this duplicate problem which to me isn't a problem?
Technical SEO | | RVForce0 -
Making a site mobile friendly
Hey Mozzers, Im having a go at making our site mobile friendly without enlisting the help of developers and incorporating additional costs. I am ok with most of it as its just CSS work bar the odd occasion when i need to reposition some elements within the code. However, i have found myself wanting to use display:none {} on many elements that are just not practical on a mobile site. Some pages may have to hide substantial content. Would this be considered an issue or will google just see it as me hiding impractical elements for a different sized screen. I have googled this question for the past hour and there is a whole bunch of conflicting advice. As always, Many thanks
Technical SEO | | ATP0 -
Subdomain question
Hi guys, I have a subdomain on my site that i want to completely remove from the index. I tried already everything to remove it but it is special situation so the only choice i have left is to remove it from Search Console in "Remove URLs" feature. So my question is: if i remove my root subdomain (example: http://subdomain.mydomain.com/) via "Remove URLs" feature in Webmaster Console, will it remove all the URLs coming from that particular domain as well? I also want to make sure that my root domain will stay untouched and be functioning normally. Thank you for advice!
Technical SEO | | odmsoft0 -
Mobile site not ranking
Hello, Our main site ranks well for all the keyword terms, and yet, our mobile site is buried. It is a "m." configuration, and I am wondering if it is a question of not using the correct programming language to get it there? Or if the redirects to the main site should relate differently? I have tried to read up on the topic of mobile site SEO and cannot find (or understand) the answer? Could someone please help? Thanks so much in advance!
Technical SEO | | lfrazer0 -
IP canonization
Hi, I need your opinions about IP canonization. Site www.peoplemaps.com is on 78.136.30.112 IP. Now we redirect that IP to the main page (because of possible duplicate content). But, we have more sites on the same IP address. How can that affect on their SEO? Before redirecting, when we visit that IP address, the browser showed mainpage of www.peoplemaps.com, not any other site. Thanks, Milan edit: We have used 301 redirect.
Technical SEO | | MilanB.0 -
Panda recovery timeframe question
Site was hit by Panda Aug. 22nd. Lost 90% of Google traffic. I know 🙂 We think we found a reason and made few changes to landing pages structure. Updated sitemaps submitted. When can we expect effect (if any) - few days or after next Panda data refresh? Thank you!P.S. What is also interesting, similar traffic loss from Bing/Yahoo happened at exactly the same date. Does that mean Bing is "stealing" search results from Google when can't provide their own relevant results? 🙂
Technical SEO | | LocalLocal0 -
Canonical
I am seeing canonical implementation in many sites for non identical pages. Google honoring these implementation and didn't have any issue. Did anyone have different experience? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | gmk15670 -
Partial mobile sitemap
Hi, We have a main www website with a standard sitemap. We also have a m. site for mobile content (but m. is only for our top pages and doesn't include the entire site). If a mobile client accesses one of our www pages we redirect to the m. page. If we don't have a m. version we keep them on the www site. Currently we block robots from the mobile site. Since our m. site only contains the top pages, I'm trying to determine the boost we might get from creating a mobile sitemap. I don't want to create the "partial" mobile sitemap and somehow have it hurt our traffic. Here is my plan update m. pages to point rel canonical to appropriate www page (makes sure we don't dilute SEO across m. and www.) create mobile sitemap and allow all robots to access site. Our www pages already rank fairly highly so just want to verify if there are any concerns since m. is not a complete version of www?
Technical SEO | | NicB10