SEO for mobile sites?
-
Let's say I have an ecommerce site and it has a separate theme via device detection. So I may even have different content on the pages. So for example, on desktop, on mysite.com/flowers I have a video about flowers. But on mobile, I have 10 000 words of text. Will this page rank better for people searching via mobile? Will google give different search rankings, based on desktop vs. mobile? Or how is Google calculating this? Are there any good mobile SEO tips or a knowhow base?
-
Hm, there are a lot of subtleties in here.
First, if you have mysite.com/flowers and m.mysite.com/flowers with completely different content on them, Google is not going to think they're the same page. They'll rank differently based on their own merits, and Google will probably rank _bot__h _of them for desktop and mobile. Google wants to give searchers access to all content across the web, so if you have two pages with different information, it'll show them as two resources.
Now, if you follow mobile best practices, you'll make m.mysite.com/flowers rel="canonical" to mysite.com/flowers, and rel="alternate" mysite.com/flowers to m.mysite.com/flowers. In that case, you're telling Google that mysite.com/flowers is the original source of information, and m.mysite.com/flowers is the same information presented differently. In that case, Google will only rank mysite.com/flowers for desktop searches and m.mysite.com/flowers for mobile searches. I'm not 100% sure how Google will handle the differing content in this case, but my guess is, it'll rank m.mysite.com/flowers as well as mysite.com/flowers would rank for the search, but it'll use the page title, URL, and meta description from m.mysite.com/flowers.
Like Andy said, Search Engine Land has a great guide to mobile SEO. I also wrote a guide that's more broadly about building a good mobile site and not just about SEO: https://www.distilled.net/training/mobile-seo-guide/
What's your real question behind all this? Are you building a mobile site and planning on making it significantly different than your desktop site? In that case, I'd recommend that you don't. If you have a video about flowers and 10,000 words of text on it, but both on your /flowers page and allow desktop and mobile visitors to access both. Generally, you want your mobile site experience to be as close as possible to the experience of browsing your desktop site. Otherwise, it's just confusing.
-
Matt,
On the mobile front simply focus on the users and UI.
On the SEO front, you just need to do the following -
- Place user agent specific redirects
- Place canonical tags on the mobile pages to the corresponding pages of desktop
This will ensure that you are not hit by duplicate content penalty and at the same time user experience is not hampered.
With the exception of local results, the search landscape on the organic front for mobiles as well as desktop is not majorly varied.
Hope this helps.
- Sajeet
-
Hi Jaan,
This is probably a good place to start. Loads of useful information about mobile SEO.
http://searchengineland.com/the-definitive-guide-to-mobile-technical-seo-166066
-Andy
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
-
Our Sites Organic Traffic Went Down Significantly After The June Core Algorithm Update, What Can I Do?
After the June Core Algorithim Update, the site suffered a loss of about 30-35% of traffic. My suggestions to try to get traffic back up have been to add metadata (since the majority of our content is lacking it), as well ask linking if possible, adding keywords to alt images, expanding and adding content as it's thin content wise. I know that from a technical standpoint there are a lot of fixes we can implement, but I do not want to suggest anything as we are onboarding an SEO agency soon. Last week, I saw that traffic for the site went back to "normal" for one day and then saw a dip of 30% the next day. Despite my efforts, traffic has been up and down, but the majority of organic traffic has dipped overall this month. I have been told by my company that I am not doing a good job of getting numbers back up, and have been given a warning stating that I need to increase traffic by 25% by the end of the month and keep it steady, or else. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is it realistic and/or possible to reach that goal?
Algorithm Updates | | NBJ_SM2 -
Is it bad from an SEO perspective that cached AMP pages are hosted on domains other than the original publisher's?
Hello Moz, I am thinking about starting to utilize AMP for some of my website. I've been researching this AMP situation for the better part of a year and I am still unclear on a few things. What I am primarily concerned with in terms of AMP and SEO is whether or not the original publisher gets credit for the traffic to a cached AMP page that is hosted elsewhere. I can see the possible issues with this from an SEO perspective and I am pretty sure I have read about how SEOs are unhappy about this particular aspect of AMP in other places. On the AMP project FAQ page you can find this, but there is very little explanation: "Do publishers receive credit for the traffic from a measurement perspective?
Algorithm Updates | | Brian_Dowd
Yes, an AMP file is the same as the rest of your site – this space is the publisher’s canvas." So, let's say you have an AMP page on your website example.com:
example.com/amp_document.html And a cached copy is served with a URL format similar to this: https://google.com/amp/example.com/amp_document.html Then how does the original publisher get the credit for the traffic? Is it because there is a canonical tag from the AMP version to the original HTML version? Also, while I am at it, how does an AMP page actually get into Google's AMP Cache (or any other cache)? Does Google crawl the original HTML page, find the AMP version and then just decide to cache it from there? Are there any other issues with this that I should be aware of? Thanks0 -
Why SEO
Hi Guys, it's going to be a long one so thank you from advance for your patience. First i wanted you to i am new to SEO world and this world excites me In the last 30 days, i started to check my companies (i am employee not an owner) website in SEO point of view. What we do: Online grocery shopping and home delivery www.artizone.com I will share with you some of the results: 5482 errors for duplicate page content 8850 errors for duplicate page title 37 title missing or empty some pages had 4+ H1 tags many more HTML errors. page authority 42/100 domain authority 40/100 We have no listing 163 back-links domain to our Dallas & Chicago website and much more another thing i checked was where are we for the keywords that we are interested in: "online grocery shopping Dallas" - position 1 in Google search shop for groceries online Dallas - Position 1 in Google search shop for groceries from home Dallas - Position 1 in Google search And some more and the same for Chicago I Did all the searches in new incognito window My Question - how come we build our website so bad, with no Google+, we have very few back-links(compare to our competitors) and the page and domain rank are so low and still we are in the 2 or 3 highest position in Google search One more question - Why to invest time in fixing all the SEO issues i found? You are all welcome to have a SEO view in my website Thank you vest much Ivgi
Algorithm Updates | | iivgi0 -
Help with local Seo?
Hi, I am really struggling with current predicament i find myself in. I am a small to medium sized business based in Newcastle in the UK and am trying to rank well locally for the keywords that i feel my customers will be searching for locally. I have got to the stage where i am on page 1 of google uk or nearly there but cannot compete against the national companies who have the search terms then just add pages for virtually every city in the country. For example my main product is "Artificial Grass" and my city/town is Newcastle This is where my office is and where my customers are. This is also where my google places page states. Now theres a company that sells Artificial Grass called www.asgoodasgrass.co.uk that are based no where near but use the power of there site to come up in every local search by adding a page "Artificial Grass Newcastle" as well as hundreds of others. They rank 3rd and im 8th. There actual Newcastle page is poor, where as i put everything into my page including pics, video etc. Still no joy. I feel i am always going to rank behind these big boys even though i am the actual local company and have no intention of working others area that are not local to me. By the time i rank behind the above type companies and the likes of yell.com i feel i am never going to be seen and fall back on expensive adwords to help me along. I am a complete newbie at this and would love any help or tips you could give to give me a fighting chance in my area. My site is www.totaldrivewaysne.co.uk incase you want to look as you will have gathered my other primary product is driveways for which also i feel like i have a million competitors! many many thanks for any responses John
Algorithm Updates | | totaldriveways0 -
Client's site dropped completely from Google - AGAIN! Please help...
ok guys - hoping someone out there can help... (kinda long, but wanted to be sure all the details were out there) Already had this happen once - even posted in here about it - http://www.seomoz.org/q/client-s-site-dropped-completely-for-all-keywords-but-not-brand-name-not-manual-penalty-help Guy was a brand new client, all we did was tweak title tags and add a bit of content to his site since most was generic boilerplate text... started on our KW research and competitor research... in just a week, from title tag and content tweaks alone, he went from ranking on page 4-5 to ranking on page 3-4... then as we sat down to really optimize his site... POOF - he was gone from the Googs... He only showed up in "site:" searches and for exact matches of his business name - everything else was gone. Posted in here and on WMT - had several people check it out, both local guys and people from here (thanks to John Doherty for trying!) - but no one could figure out any reason why it would have happened. We submitted a reconsideration request, explaining that we knew we hadn't violated any quality guidelines, that he had less than 10 backlinks so it couldn't be bad linking, and that we had hardly touched the site. They sent back a canned response a week later that said there was no manual penalty and that we should "check our content" - mysteriously, the site started to show back up in the SERPs that morning (we got the canned response in the afternoon) There WAS an issue with NAP mismatch on some citations, but we fixed that, and that shouldn't have contributed to complete disappearance anyway. SO - the site was back, and back at its page 3 or 4 position... we decided to leave it alone for a few days just to be sure we didn't do anything... and then just 6 days later, when we were sitting down to fully optimize the site - POOF - completely gone again. We do SEO for a lot of different car dealers all over the country, and i know our strategies work. Looking at the competition in his market, he should easily be ranked page 2 or 3 with the very minimal tweaking we did... AND, since we didn't change anything since he came back, it makes even less sense that he was visible for a week and then gone again. So, mozzers... Anybody got any ideas? I'm really at a loss here - it makes zero sense that he's completely gone, except for his biz name... if nothing else, he should be ranking for "used cars canton"... Definitely appreciate any help anyone can offer -
Algorithm Updates | | Greg_Gifford0 -
Why is this site ranking 1st?
I'm a relative SEO newbie, so please go easy on me. I've been an SEOMOZ pro user for a few months and have used it to dramatically improve my organic rankings. However, for the life of me, I cannot determine why the site that currently ranks number one, does so. For the factors I can determine, they shouldn't be ranking where they are, but reality is different. Could someone please offer me some ideas? My target keyword is "photography classes edmonton" My site is www.bsop.ca and I'm targetting the Google Canada engine. Any and all assistance is appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | pburwell0 -
FLASH vs HTML links in SEO
In terms of a small flash slideshow and having text and links on various slides within, is such text and links as easily index-able (or even at all) compared to static html text on a webpage?
Algorithm Updates | | heritageseo0 -
SEO Ranking & Brand Names
I have several situations where one of my sites rank organically in 4th or 5th place for a specific search term relating to a 'big brand' .. I usually fall in behind the brands main website .. commercially this is very good for me. Let me give you an example .. in google.co.uk type in 'thomas cook exchange rates'. I rank position 4 (comparecurrency.co.uk). Position 1-3 are thomas cook's own pages. Naturally. However, my question is .. could I outrank them and how could I initially measure the effort involved in getting to position 1? I noticed Google recently put me into position 1 for this term and then quickly (within a few days) pulled me back down to position 4. Does anyone have any experience of this type of search positioning and have any information that may help me? My gut feel is that I have maybe maxed out the economically viable potential of these keywords and that I should invest my SEO $s into other phrases? Thanks in advance Olly
Algorithm Updates | | ojkingston0