Why are these m. results showing as blocked?
-
If you go to http://bit.ly/173gdWK, you'll see that m. results are showing as blocked by robots.txt, but we don't have anything in our robots.txt file that specifies to block m. results. Any ideas why these URLs show as blocked?
-
Yeah, I was testing exactly the same when you posted the response. I even tried crawling a googlebot-mobile and still I get the 301 redirect. Which, for everything that I am seeing it is correct, as no matter what browser I use (desktop, mobile, spider) I always get a 301 to the www. version.
@michelleh, are you sure there's a mobile version not being redirected to the www. one?
-
(Using example.com instead of your domain in case you want anonymity later)
If you try to go to any of these m.example.com URLs on your desktop computer, you're redirected on the server to a www.example.com URL. I'm guessing Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile cannot access m. pages (unless you're sniffing out Googlebot-Mobile specifically to serve it m.example.com pages). If you're looking at screen resolution for these redirects, you might not be catching Googlebot-Mobile, as I don't think Googlebot-Mobile gives a screen resolution in its user agent. I believe you want Googlebot indexing your www. content, and Googlebot-Mobile indexing your m. content, so you'll need to sniff out Googlebot-Mobile's user agent (see here), and redirect it to m. content.
Also of note is that I think these should be 302 temporary redirects, and not 301 permanent redirects between your www. and m. versions, as they're not really permanent, just getting a given user to the right version of the site. Also, you don't let me switch from the mobile version to the desktop version, which drives me bananas! Let users choose after the initial redirect. If you allow people to switch, but maintain 301 redirects, the browsers may cache some of the redirects which will lead to weird behavior if people hit a page that redirected before.
You don't have a robots.txt file at m.example.com/robots.txt, as that redirects to www.example.com/robots.txt even on my phone. I don't think this is the root of the problem, but once you figure things out, you can set up a robots.txt file on your m. subdomain.
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
-
Where to point canonical for m-dot site in the wake of Mobile-First Indexing
My client currently use an m-dot URL for their mobile site and while conducting a technical audit for their web properties, we have noticed that their desktop is using a self-referencing rel="canonical" while their mobile m-dot has no rel="canonical" tags. While our initial recommendation is to point the mobile m-dot point to the desktop using a rel="canonical" and the desktop point to the mobile using a rel="alternative," there have been hesitations about mobile first indexing and canonical tags. If Google will use the m-dot for indexing purposes moving forward, is the progressive recommendation to have the desktop point to the m-dot using a rel="canonical" and the m-dot point to the desktop using a rel="alternative" or to maintain the initially stated recommendation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Derek_Hawk0 -
How long after https migration that google shows in search console new sitemap being indexed?
We migrated 4 days ago to https and followed best practices..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
In search console now still 80% of our sitemaps appear as "pending" and among those sitemaps that were processed only less than 1% of submitted pages appear as indexed? Is this normal ?
How long does it take for google to index pages from sitemap?
Before https migration nearly all our pages were indexed and I see in the crawler stats that google has crawled a number of pages each day after migration that corresponds to number of submitted pages in sitemap. Sitemap and crawler stats show no errors.0 -
Blocking Certain Site Parameters from Google's Index - Please Help
Hello, So we recently used Google Webmaster Tools in an attempt to block certain parameters on our site from showing up in Google's index. One of our site parameters is essentially for user location and accounts for over 500,000 URLs. This parameter does not change page content in any way, and there is no need for Google to index it. We edited the parameter in GWT to tell Google that it does not change site content and to not index it. However, after two weeks, all of these URLs are still definitely getting indexed. Why? Maybe there's something we're missing here. Perhaps there is another way to do this more effectively. Has anyone else ran into this problem? The path we used to implement this action:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jbake
Google Webmaster Tools > Crawl > URL Parameters Thank you in advance for your help!0 -
Guest Blogging Results - domain authority vs. page authority -
I have been guest blogging on various websites. The web pages that display my guest posts have zero page authority but a great domain authority of 60/100 or more. 2 links I developed are noted below as examples: http://www.evancarmichael.com/Small-Business-Consulting/8101/How-To-Hire-Extraordinary-Salespeople.html https://www.biggerpockets.com/blogs/4195/blog_posts/28772-4-essentials-for-rental-property-owners Am I wasting my time with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | superZj
Thank you!0 -
Block a country, will affect my ranking?
Dear Mozzers, I intend to block some certain countries from viewing my website (including proxy), will it affect my Google ranking? Thank you for your help. BR/Tran
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveTran20130 -
Search results all going to home page
I'm an author, and after doing a search for one of my books I realized that no matter what was searched, the user was getting lead to the homepage. please see the attached picture. How do I fix this and is this hurting my SEO? Capture.JPG Capture1.JPG
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports0 -
How to Block Google Preview?
Hi, Our site is very good for Javascript-On users, however many pages are loaded via AJAX and are inaccessible with JS-off. I'm looking to make this content available with JS-off so Search Engines can access them, however we don't have the Dev time to make them 'pretty' for JS-off users. The idea is to make them accessible with JS-off, but when requested by a user with JS-on the user is forwarded to the 'pretty' AJAX version. The content (text, images, links, videos etc) is exactly the same but it's an enormous amount of effort to make the JS-off version 'pretty' and I can't justify the development time to do this. The problem is that Googlebot will index this page and show a preview of the ugly JS-off page in the preview on their results - which isn't good for the brand. Is there a way or meta code that can be used to stop the preview but still have it cached? My current options are to use the meta noarchive or "Cache-Control" content="no-cache" to ask Google to stop caching the page completely, but wanted to know if there was a better way of doing this? Any ideas guys and girls? Thanks FashionLux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
How can I specify which image to show in SERPs from my Rich Snippet?
When I test my web page (which has Schema.org based content embedded within it) using the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool, it displays the last image I have defined. I want it to show the first (primary) image. Is there a way I can specify which image to use, or should I only be specifying one image? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Techboy1