Mobile Search Results Include Pages Meant Only for Desktops/Laptops
-
When I put in site:www.qjamba.com on a mobile device it comes back with some of my mobile-friendly pages for that site(same url for mobile and desktop-just different formatting), and that's great. HOWEVER, it also shows a whole bunch of the pages (not identified by Google as mobile-friendly) that are fine for desktop users but are not supposed to exist for the mobile users, because they are too slow. Until a few days ago those pages were being redirected for mobile users to the home page. I since have changed that to 404 not founds.
Do we know that Google keeps a mobile index separate from the desktop index? If so, I would think that 404 should work..
How can I test whether the 404 not founds will remove a url so they DON'T appear on a mobile device when I put in site:www.qjamba.com (or a user searches) but DO appear on a desktop for the same command.
-
Hi Kristina,
I just responded to you on the other (related) issue at http://moz.com/community/q/mobile-search-results-show-desktop-crawled-content#reply_270529 before seeing your response here. Sorry about that.
Thanks for your response. It really hadn't occurred to me to allow mobile users to use those pages because the experience would be pretty bad for the most part, and a lot slower for those pages, but it definitely is a thought for solving my indexing issue. I could give the mobile user a popup the first time they venture into the 'unmobile-friendly pages' as a heads up about which parts are mobile friendly and which aren't...I wonder though if Google will penalize the site or those pages in some way since it will not be able to render them as mobile friendly for a mobile device..EDIT: just saw this: http://www.cnet.com/news/make-web-sites-mobile-friendly-or-face-google-search-wrath/....anyway, interesting alternative, It wouldn't be as easy as it sounds because of the degree of customization in menus I've done for the mobile pages, but may well be a lot easier than other alternatives.. Thanks very much!
Ted
-
Hi again,
I'm not a developer, so I can't ask your direct question about how to return 404s to mobile visitors and 200s to desktop visitors, but I would like to weigh in on the best practices here.
The reason Google is continuing to index these pages even though they're not formatted for mobile is because Google wants to give mobile visitors access to the same information as desktop visitors. If there is content on your desktop site that isn't on your mobile site, Google will just return those desktop pages.
Standard options for you are:
- Allow mobile visitors to access those pages, knowing they won't have a great user experience, but allowing them to find exactly what they were looking for. You can use Google Analytics to understand which pages mobile visitors are seeing the most and prioritize converting those pages to mobile.
- For mobile pages that have consolidated content from desktop pages, you can rel="alternate" each desktop page to the consolidated mobile page.
Hope this helps!
Kristina
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
-
Thousands of 503 errors in GSC for pages not important to organic search - Is this a problem?
Hi, folks A client of mine now has roughly 30 000 503-errors (found in the crawl error section of GSC). This is mostly pages with limited offers and deals. The 503 error seems to occur when the offers expire, and when the page is of no use anymore. These pages are not important for organic search, but gets traffic from direct and newsletters, mostly. My question:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
Does having a high number of 503 pages reported in GSC constitute a problem in terms of organic ranking for the domain and the category and product pages (the pages that I want to rank for organically)? If it does, what is the best course of action to mitigate the problem? Looking excitingly forward to your answers to this 🙂 Sigurd0 -
Best format for E-Commerce Pages in Title Text / Link Text & Markup
Hello Please comment on which you think is best SEO practice for each & any comments on link juice following through. Title text ( on Product Page ) <title>Brandname ProductName</title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear
OR
<title>ProductName by Brandname</title> on category page <a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">itemprop="name" href="[producturl]">ProductName</a>
<a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">itemprop="brand" href="[brandurl]>BrandName</a> OR <a <span class="html-attribute-name">itemprop="name" href="[producturl]">BrandName ProductName
( Leave Brand Link Out)</a <span> Product Page <a itemprop="name" href="[producturl]">ProductName
<a itemprop="brand" href="[brandurl]>BrandName</a itemprop="brand" href="[brandurl]></a itemprop="name" href="[producturl]"> OR <a itemprop="name" href="[producturl]">BrandName ProductName
( Leave Brand Link Out)</a itemprop="name" href="[producturl]"> Thoughts?0 -
Hey there, i'm working on search results in dutch.
My biggest competitor who's number 1 in main keywords in google has almost only links from 'linkfarms' and blog comments. How is he ranked that high? Would it be a good idea to add a bit the best of these in my mix, while i work on the real good quality content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ValleyofTea0 -
We are switching our CMS local pages from a subdomain approach to a subfolder approach. What's the best way to handle this? Should we redirect every local subdomain page to its new subfolder page?
We are looking to create a new subfolder approach within our website versus our current subdomain approach. How should we go about handling this politely as to not lose everything we've worked on up to this point using the subdomain approach? Do we need to redirect every subdomain URL to the new subfolder page? Our current local pages subdomain set up: stores.websitename.com How we plan on adding our new local subfolder set-up: websitename.com/stores/state/city/storelocation Any and all help is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO.CIC0 -
Desktop & Mobile Sitemaps Covering The Same Ground - Any Benefit To Having Both?
If my URL structure is the same for the desktop and mobile experience, is there any benefit to creating a mobile sitemap, considering that the sitemap for our desktop site covers the same URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edmundsseo0 -
Domain changed 5 months ago still see search results on old domain
Hi, We changed our domain from coedmagazine.com to coed.com in April'13. Applied 301 redirects on all pages, submitted 'change of address' to google but we still see site:coedmagazine.com fetching 130K results on google as opposed to site:coed.com fetches 40K results. Can anybody here throw some light on what might be going wrong? [ Site runs on wordpress, hosted with wordpress as well ] thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | COEDMediaGroup0 -
Penguin/Panda/Domain Purchase
If I move forward with the acquisition: 1. Should I, if there is a way, just acquire the domain and then attempt to unlink existing links? 2. Can I just buy the domain, completely kill the site, and then build again from scratch? Even if I do that, the links to the domain will still be out there. 3. Should I even move forward with the purchase if I know these tactics have been used? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0 -
3 results for a site on page one?!?
Hi, I've never seen a website rank on page 1 in position 2, 3 and 4 for one query, completely separate results as well. I thought they limited the amount of results from a website on each page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0