Mobile site ranking in desktop searches
-
A robots.txt file is properly implemented on the mobile site to block Googlebot from crawling, yet, when running a site: query for the site in google, it still returns over 104,000 pages from the mobile site in the index.
Why could this be happening?
-
I have thse recomendations:
1. Specify your Doctype to help Google see what your content type is. For mobile Google supports XHTML Basic, XHTML Mobile Profile, XHTML, WML, cHTML (iMode), and EZweb (KDDI). We run HTML 5, CSS 3 and jQuery successfully but these are not specified by google, so i would recommend to be safe and go with what Google supports.
2. Add a specialized XML Sitemap for Mobile. It is basically the same as the usual Sitemap apart from adding these to elements: xmlns:mobile="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0 and mobile:mobileRead more here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34648</mobile:mobile>
P.S. Name it mobilesitemap.xml.
3. Use WURFL to redirect PC users finding mobi content in the www index back to the PC version.
That should help.
-
If you haven't asked a question in private Q&A yet this month, you can ask there and share your URL, as that is private and available to only SEOmoz staff and associates.
Have you gone into GWT and requested removal of the site? If you verify the site, and then have the site/directory blocked via robots.txt, you can use the removal tool to request removal rather than waiting for things to drop out of the index.
-
Thanks for responding Keri!
I can confirm that there are no parameters overriding the robots.txt within the code. I also can confirm that there is nothing amiss with the verification of the robots.txt.
Also, unfortunately, due to the nature of the client, we are unable to put the URL out there.
If you have any other thoughts, please do share. Sorry I couldn't be of more help.
Thank you.
-
How long has the robots.txt file been in place? If you added it just a few days ago, it takes time for things to get out of the index. Other thoughts are looking at the source code of the pages on the mobile site -- is there a robots parameter on the page that is overriding robots.txt?
Have you gone into GWT and used the robots verification tool there to make sure nothing was amiss?
If you can give us your URL, the community can take a look and see if they can figure anything out.
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
-
Redirecting old html site to new wordpress site
Hi I'm currently updating an old (8 years old) html site to wordpress and about a month ago I redirected some url's to the new site (which is in a directory) like this... Redirect 301 /article1.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article1/
Technical SEO | | briandee
Redirect 301 /article2.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article2/
Redirect 301 /article3.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article3/ Google has indexed these new url's and they are showing in search results. I'm almost finished the new version of site and it is currently in a directory /wordpress I intend to move all the files from the directory to the root so new url when this is done will be http://mysite.net/article1/ etc My question is - what to I do about the redirects which are in place - do I delete them and replace with something like this? Redirect 301 /wordpress/article1/ http://mysite.net/article1/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article2/ http://mysite.net/article2/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article3/ http://mysite.net/article3/ Appreciate any help with this0 -
Question on Google's Site: Search
A client currently has two domains with the same content on each. When I pull up a Cached version of the site, I noticed that it has a Cache of the correct page on it. However, when I do a site: in Google, I am seeing the domain that we don't want Google indexing. Is this a problem? There is no canonical tag and I'm not sure how Google knows to cache the correct website but it does. I'm assuming they have this set in webmaster tools? Any help is much appreciated! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jeff_46mile0 -
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect?
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect? If this scenario requires a 301 redirect no matter what, I might as well update the URL to be a little more keyword rich for the page while I'm at it. However, since these pages are ranking well I'd rather not lose any authority in the process and keep the URL just stripped of the ".html" (if that's possible). Thanks for you help! [edited for formatting]
Technical SEO | | Booj0 -
Pointing Other URL to My Site? Good or bad for ranking.
A few years ago I purchased a few keyword rich domain names and set up some satellite sites. Spammy I now know. What should I do now? I own the domain names for at least another 3 years. Should I point them to my main site or would that hurt my main site ranking?
Technical SEO | | caisson0 -
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
Technical SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
What has happened to my page rank
hi my page rank for the site www.in2town.co.uk was page rank four and then last week it went down to page rank 2 and now my page rank is 0. i really do not understand what has happened. can anyone please give me advice on what is happening
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Any good ideas on how to quickly rank a new site for a new product laucnh?
Hi, I'm thinking of examples like the wii u - when it was announced all wii u sites were new. what ways could one get an edge quickly when competing against other sites without a great deal of authority on this 'new' keyword? obvious ones are social bookmarking, what else could easily be used to quickly (<24hrs) at least help a bit in non competitive kws?
Technical SEO | | dmn020 -
.CA site same as .com site - are both necessary?
Dear Friend, We representa a major national brand in the auto care industry, and they have locations in both US and Canada. There is a primary content site at .com that we have duplicated at .ca. We are hosting the .ca site on a separate IP on a server in Canada - but by in large it is the same site. (there are some minor changes we made to change US English to Canadian English - though minor. When we search Google.ca we generally see strong search results for the .com site, but rarely, if ever any evidence of rankings for the .ca site. The .com site was launched several years ago about 18 months before the .ca site. Why doesn't Google.ca show the .ca site? Is this an issue of duplicate content, and Google.ca simply shows the .com version which it knew about first? Are we wasting our time, money and efforts having both? Thanks, Tim ps. this isn't about location. We use a separate site to locate local shops, and have coordinated that well with Google Places, and when looking for local auto care - we do well in both US and Canada. The sites described above are largetl content sites.
Technical SEO | | lunavista-comm0