Robots.txt & Mobile Site
-
Background - Our mobile site is on the same domain as our main site. We use a folder approach for our mobile site abc.com/m/home.html We are re-directing traffic to our mobile site vie device detection and re-direction exists for a handful of pages of our site ie most of our pages do not redirect the user to a mobile equivalent page.
Issue – Our mobile pages are being indexed in desktop Google searches
Input Required – How should we modify our robots.txt so that the desktop google index does not index our mobile pages/urls
User-agent:
Googlebot-Mobile
Disallow: /m
User-agent: `YahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2`
Disallow: /m
User-agent: `MSNBOT_Mobile`
Disallow: /m
Many thanks
-
Hi,
The fact that you do not have mobile versions for all pages of the site makes your case a bit of an odd one when it comes to best practices. I would recommend if at all possible to address this and make all pages available in mobile format also.
If for whatever reason this is not possible then I think you are better off using a meta robots tag NOINDEX to get your mobile results out of the serps completely and a rel canonical to the relevant desktop page to make extra sure there are no issues with duplicate content.
If you can get all pages into a mobile version then you will want to implement proper redirects based on user string as you are doing, and also implement rel alternate/canonical tags between the desktop and mobile pages of the site (which should make sure the right version of the site shows up in the relevant serps). For more details on the whole setup check:
http://moz.com/blog/how-to-optimize-a-mobile-site and
http://moz.com/blog/mobile-seo-process -
User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Disallow: /m
would't that statement prevent Googlebot-Mobile from crawling the mobile pages ? Why would you want to do that ?
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
-
Main Site and eCommerce Site URLs for SEO
My client currently has a main website on a url and an eCommerce site on a subdomain. The eCommerce site is currently not mobile friendly, has images that are too small and are problematic - and I believe it negates some of the SEO work we do for them. I had to turn off Google Shopping ads because the quality score was so low. That being said, they are rebuilding a shopping cart on a new platform that will be mobile friendly BUT the images are going to be tiny until they slowly replace images over several months. Would you keep the shopping cart on a subdomain, or make it part of the main website URL? Can it negatively impact the progress we have made on the main site SEO.
Technical SEO | | jerrico10 -
Robots.txt Syntax for Dynamic URLs
I want to Disallow certain dynamic pages in robots.txt and am unsure of the proper syntax. The pages I want to disallow all include the string ?Page= Which is the proper syntax?
Technical SEO | | btreloar
Disallow: ?Page=
Disallow: ?Page=*
Disallow: ?Page=
Or something else?0 -
Content on desktop and mobile
My website hasn't using responsive design and separate domain for mobile optimize, But we using dynamic serving for mobile version, Read more about dynamic serving here So our website must different design for both version, And then what would be happen in term of SEO if our website hasn't show the same content as desktop but still align with the main content, Such as Desktop has longer content compare to mobile version or Desktop has long H1 but mobile is shorter than. What should we do for this case and how to tell Google Bot.
Technical SEO | | ASKHANUMANTHAILAND0 -
Google Indexing Desktop & Mobile Versions
We have a relatively new site and I have noticed recently that Google seems to be indexing both the mobile and the desktop version of our site. There are some queries where the mobile version will show up and sometimes both mobile and desktop show up. This can't be good. I would imagine that what is supposed to happen is that the desktop version is the one that should be indexed (always) and browser detection will load the mobile version where appropriate once the user is on the site. Do you have any advice on what we should do to solve this problem as we are a bit stuck?
Technical SEO | | simonukss0 -
Will a robots.txt disallow apply to a 301ed URL?
Hi there, I have a robots.txt query which I haven't tried before and as we're nearing a big time for sales, I'm hesitant to just roll out to live! Say for example, in my robots.txt I disallow the URL 'example1.html'. In reality, 'example1.html' 301s/302s to 'example2.html'. Would the robots.txt directive also apply to 'example2.html' (disallow) or as it's a separate URL, would the directive be ignored as it's not valid? I have a feeling that as it's a separate URL, the robots disallow directive won't apply. However, just thought I'd sense-check with the community.
Technical SEO | | ecommercebc0 -
Trying to get google to know my site is a magazine site is this wrong
Hi, i have put a line to describe what my site is at the top of my site and i want to know if this is wrong or not. We have dropped frok being number one in google for lifestyle magazine to now number seven. Before we had to redo our site we were number one and then we dropepd to around number four when we finished the site and now we are number seven and i need to try and get back up there. To help google know we are a lifestyle magazine i have put a line at the top of the site and i want to know if this looks out of place and if i should take it down. i need advice on how to get google to know we are a lifestyle magazine and get back in the top five of google my site is www.in2town.co.uk any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How is this site doing this?
http://www.meccabingo.com It shows a splash / promotion page yet you check the cache and it's the real homepage, they are doing this so they don't lose rankings but how are they redirecting users to that but Google is caching the real homepage? is it friendly? thanks!!
Technical SEO | | AdiRste0