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
-
Why is this site ranking higher?
We've put a fair bit of effort into delivering value here: https://lewescountycars.co.uk/ But a search for "Lewes taxis" or "taxis Lewes" puts this site above us: https://www.lewestowntaxis.co.uk/ As you can you see, this is a tiny site that we outperform in most ways.... what can we do to rank above it that we haven't already done? Thanks in advance - Gerard.
Technical SEO | | Paul7301 -
How Long To Recover Rankings After Multi-Day Site Outage?
Hi, A site we look after for a client was down for almost 3 days at the start of this month (11th - 14th of May, to be exact). This was caused by my client's failure to verify their domain name in accordance with the new ICANN procedures. The details are unimportant, but it took a long while for them to get their domain name registration contact details validated, hence the outage. Very soon after this down time we noticed that the site has slipped back in the Google rankings for most of the target keywords, sometimes quite considerably. I guess this is Google penalizing this client for their failure to keep their site live. (And they really can't have too many complaints about this, in my opinion). The good news is that the rankings show signs of improving again slightly. However, they have not recovered all the way to where they were before the outage, two weeks ago. My question is this ... do you expect that the site will naturally re-gain the previous excellent rankings without us doing anything? If so, how long do you estimate this could take? On the other hand, if Google typically penalizes this kind of error by 'permanently', is there is anything we can do to help signal to Google that the site deserves to get back up to where is used to be? I am keen to get your thoughts, and especially to hear from anyone who has faced a similar problem in the past. Thanks
Technical SEO | | smaavie0 -
Mobile site content and main site content
Help, pls! I have one main site and a mobile version of that site (m.domain.com). The main site has more pages, more content, different named urls. The main site has consistently done well in Google. The mobile site has not: the mobile site is buried. I am working on adding more content to the mobile site, but am concerned about duplicate content. Could someone pls tell me the best way to deal with these two versions of our site? I can't use rel=canonical because the urls do not correspond to the same names on the main site, or can I? Does this mean I need to change the url names, offer different content (abridged), etc? I really am at a loss as to how to interpret Google's rules for this. Could someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? Any help or tips would GREATLY appreciated!!!!! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | lfrazer0 -
Site not coming up even when I search with the .com
We have a customer whose site: http://camilojosevergara.com doesn't show up even when you search for his exact domain. http://bit.ly/18RjPPX Wondering why that is. Is it because wikipedia and the other links rank higher? I've submitted his sitemap to google so I'm trying to figure out why its not showing up. Any tips/recommendations to fix this would be greatly appreciated. thanks
Technical SEO | | callmeed0 -
SEO for mobile
Hey everyone! I had just finished building my first mobile website and i wanna focus on SEO for mobile search. Now, since there is a redirection once a visitor enter to the web domain to the mobile site automatically (e.g. sample.com to m.sample.com). Question is: Where should i refer my back links to to improve my ranking on mobile result page? Would love for some help..
Technical SEO | | Tit0 -
Searching in Google using the Site:www.example.com specification - is it in an order?
Hi Gurus, Just a quick searching question. If you do a Google search using the site: specification eg. site:www.example.com Is the list returned by Google in an order of something similar to 'Page Authority' or some other order eg. page first seen date etc. Because you are looking at your single site, is Google listing your pages back to you in it's perceived order of current 'popularity'? Thanks, Brad
Technical SEO | | BM70 -
Exclude mobile pages from non mobile Google serps
Hi Everybody I see that a lot of our pages on our mobile shop has started to turn up when i do site:domainname.com on google. As they could potentially compete with the similar non mobile version of the same page, is there some way to exlude the mobile domain in non mobile google result without blocking the mobile version altogether. We use an m.domain.com version for our mobile site.
Technical SEO | | AndersDK0 -
Non primary domain ranking higher in searches
Hey Guys, Hopefully I can explain this so that you can understand, let me know if you need me to clarify any particular points. I have a primary domain for my website, however someone has also pointed their domain at my server that has nothing to do with us or our website. Typing a keyword in a search engine will list our website as this has been crawled but it's listing the domain as their domain and not our primary. Is this because their domain has greater value then our primary? What's the best course of action to resolve the issue? The reason I ask is because the domain could potentially have a negative effect on business. If I setup hosting for this second domain and setup a redirect on it, all the traffic that is trying to reach us via respective search terms are then directed away from our site. I have been in contact with the domain administrator but they are yet to reply to my correspondence. Has anyone experienced something similar and come up with a good way to resolve it? Thanks guys, any help would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | digitalclubb0