Mobile friendly version (CSS) - helps in rankings on mobile searches?
-
Does anyone know if there are any theories or evidence that a mobile optimized website (CSS) has better chances of ranking on Mobile platforms - assuming links and other factors being equal?
In other words, is Google able to identify that a website has been optimized for mobiles and gives them preference/weight to rank over other websites that are not mobile optimized?
-
Well it wouldn't effect smartphones since they get the same results. Not sure how it effects mobile search still relevant to old style cell phones.
-
Thanks Stephan
Thats what we are planning to do - not create a separate site as there are many other issues with that - site management, potential duplicate content issue, etc.
To me it seems logical that assuming Google is able to identify if a website is optimized for Mobile, they would reward them for it when mobile users are searching, as that obviously leads to better user experience.
-
Hi. I posted an answer a few days back that might help:
Google serves up the same results to smart phones and desktop computers. What they recommend is use the same site and use the style sheet to control the mobile display. In other words, not making a separate site for mobile. Here is a snippet from a Google & A.
John Mueller - @Paul If you have "smartphone" content (which we see as normal web-content, as it's generally a normal HTML page, just tweaked in layout for smaller displays) you can use the rel=canonical to point to your desktop version. This helps us to focus on the desktop version for web-search. When users visit that desktop version with a smartphone, you can redirect them to the mobile version. This works regardless of the URL structure, so you don't need to use subdomains / subdirectories for smartphone-mobile sites. Even better however is to use the same URLs and to show the appropriate version of the content without a redirect :). Here is the entire article where I found the snippet.
The other option would be to make the mobile pages and canonical those back to the corresponding main site pages. This way you don't have duplicate content and you have more SEO juice flow to the main site.
In my opinion, I wouldn't even worry too much about "traditional" cell phones. I found since the beginning of the year, on STP, we've only had 1 or 2 sales via dumb phones and only a fraction of traffic compared with smart phones.
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
-
My site is not ranking at all.
Can anybody check it what is the main culprit behind my website's growth?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anshu14320 -
Mobile ranking changes seem to be faster
I updated a page and the ranking of the page on mobile has already changed whereas on desktop it hasn't. Has anyone noticed that on mobile it takes less time to see changes than on desktop ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
User intent and ranking
Hello, I was doing search to see who ranks on the keyword "bike tours" i noticed a lot of website rank without content "text". Is it because they fulfil the user intent with a search box where you can search by date and destination, trip type and price that google ranks those webpages ? It is the same for the keyword Paris bike tours https://www.fattiretours.com/paris How do they rank with so little content (once again is it because the fulfil the user intent ) Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Wrong Search words coming in search console
Hey there, My website All good but, in webmaster Search console some bad Queries(search terms) coming which is totally different from website. I want to make sure, is that harmful for my website traffic, as well as keywords Ranking?? How should i stop them to be crawl, ?? can any help for this query.?? i have attached screenshot of that, please check & help out, http://prntscr.com/cmusoq Thnx in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojaverify060 -
When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same. User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site. At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked. I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well. Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL. Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page? We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
Moving blog to a subdomain, how can I help it rank?
Hi all, We recently moved our blog to a sub-domain where it is hosted on Wordpress. It was very recent and we're actively working on the SEO, but any pointers on getting the subdomain to rank higher than the old blog posts would be terrific. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalMoz0 -
Does site size (page count) effect search ranking?
If a company has a handful of large sites that function as collection of unique portals into client-specific content (password protected), will it have any positive effect on search ranking to migrate all of the sites to one URL structure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trideagroup0 -
How do I make my URLs SEO friendly?
Hi all, I am aware that overly-dynamic URLs hurt a website's SEO potential and I want to fix mine. At present they look like this: http://www.societyboardshop.co.uk/products.php?brand=Girl+Skateboards&BrandID=153 What do I need to do to fix them please... do I add some code to the htaccess file? Many thanks, much apreciated. Paul.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul530