From my understanding of mobile-first indexing, your mobile site will become the primary version Google crawlers see when they are looking at your website. So in terms of the impact of hiding the breadcrumbs on your mobile site, Google will see that you've hidden them and may or may not see them on the desktop version because they may or may not bother to crawl the desktop version.

My question to you would be - what value are you seeing from the breadcrumbs on desktop? Can you check your analytics data to see whether users are using these breadcrumbs for navigation? Do you mark up your breadcrumbs with schema to allow them to show up in rich snippets? If the breadcrumbs do not currently add much value to your users and if they don't serve an SEO purpose, you may not need to bother including them on mobile. On the other hand, if you know that they add to a better UX, you may see a benefit from adding them to the mobile version of the site. This is because Google likes to reward sites with a better UX for mobile users. If you are using them more for search engines to have easier crawl access, I would suggest revisiting your site structure more broadly to ensure that no important page is further than 3-4 clicks from the homepage; and/or ensure that you keep your sitemaps up to date with all important pages and submit in GSC and BWT.

Hi, as long as your website is properly optimized for mobile SEO (for instance, if you use dynamic serving for the images, make sure you include the Vary-HTTP header to let Google know that you're doing that) using the same descriptions etc across all versions shouldn't cause any issues. You can also feel free to optimize each version differently if you discover (for example) that users use different search terms when searching for images on a mobile device versus a desktop.

Bear in mind these are images, so you'll want to optimize for the image content, not the target keyword of the page that the image appears on.

Hope this helps!

Hi Judd,

If you are only hiding these elements on the mobile view, this shouldn't cause an issue from a rankings perspective. You will want to make sure that they can access your CSS file (sometimes CSS files are blocked from crawlers).

It is possible that having it hidden will mean they discount that content slightly for the mobile version, but as long as they know it's a mobile version of the desktop site they will primarily take the desktop signals into consideration when it comes to rankings (with a small boost for mobile-friendliness in the mobile SERPs).

Once the mobile-first index rolls out this will change but they have stated that with mobile-first indexing, hiding content for space reasons won't negatively impact how they weight that content, so that shouldn't affect your approach practically speaking.

Hi Allison, any updates on this?

From my understanding, it is possible that Google is not indexing the mobile versions of pages if they are simply corresponding to the desktop pages (and indicated as such with the rel=alternate mobile switchboard tags). If they have that information they may simply index the desktop pages and then display the mobile URL in search results.

It is also possible that the GSC data is not accurate - if you do a 'site:' search for your mobile pages (I would try something like 'site:domain/m/' and see what shows up), does it show a higher number of mobile pages than what you're seeing in GSC?

Can you check data for your mobile rankings and see what URLs are being shown for mobile searchers? If your data is showing that mobile users are landing on these pages from search, this would indicate that they are being shown in search results, even if they're not showing up as "indexed" in GSC.

Hi Gareth,

Whatever schema.org markup you're using on that page, you should have the option to include an "image" property to define the image. Hard to get more specific without seeing the page unfortunately. But maybe check out the Schema.org list of recognized types and see which feels like the best match for the content on this page (although as a rule, category pages are a little tricky - usually you'd be using product or article markup on each individual item in the list, so I'm not sure where an image would fit into that).

Hi Gareth, you can certainly use Schema.org markup to suggest a thumbnail image for a SERP - could you share a little more context around the type of result it is for? (e.g. a product page, video thumbnail, etc). If you're comfortable sharing a screenshot that would also be helpful.

Hi John,

Are you still seeing the 'not mobile friendly' warning in the SERPs? I checked just now and wasn't able to replicate.

Hi George, I'm not sure which image you're referring to? A video snippet/recipe snippet type image? You should be able to suggest a 'featured image' in the structured data markup for those, but Google is not required to follow that suggestion.

With a bit more specific info I might be able to debug a bit more for you.

I have to disagree with the above.

Google absolutely can view mobile content, in fact they have a separate crawler that spoofs a mobile user agent in order to crawl mobile content. They may not have a separate mobile index of that content, but that has nothing to do with whether they view, crawl, and index mobile pages. We know that they do, in fact, given that whether a page is mobile-friendly is a rankings factor for mobile search results.

To answer your question - having the content collapsed shouldn't be a problem as long as the content is viewable with Javascript and CSS disabled. If Javascript is required to expand the collapsed content, the mobile crawler may not be able to see this content. You may want to test the page(s) with the Mobile-friendly Testing Tool and also try a Fetch and Render (for Smartphone) of the mobile page, to see how Google sees the page(s).

Hi, I don't personally have any case studies of sites experiencing a drop in organic traffic on mobile which can be traced to a pop-up interstitial (maybe in part because my clients don't tend to use pop-ups in that way).

When it comes to user-triggered content, I think it depends on a couple things, including how the user arrives at the pop-up and how the pop-up is implemented technically. Google's view of a site's mobile-friendliness is based on the result of a crawl, and so for instance if it's an event that isn't possible to trigger as a crawler, it shouldn't be a problem. I see it being similar to the use of JS navigation for country selection - it becomes an issue when (for instance) Googlebot can't get past a JS popup or drop-down because it can't click on a link to select a country option or to close the window.

This type of situation is often the case for the sorts of popup that occur when the page loads, giving an annoying user experience, rather than because a user has chosen to click on a link to provide an email address (for example). Google have also made clear that the primary concern is around it being a poor user experience, rather than a technical issue.

So I would see it as:

• Interstitial ad or other pop-up that appears on page load = bad.
• Some sort of non-disruptive data entry box like an email form that only appears when a user chooses to open it and which can be bypassed by a crawler = ok.

However! That's just my theory, I don't have data at the moment to prove or disprove that hypothesis. I would love to hear from other people who have other theories or any practical examples of this. Also, if you're not sure how Google perceives a given page, run it through the Mobile-friendly testing tool and they'll tell you.

Hi Pugh,

It sounds like you haven't implemented the rel=canonical tag for mobile. This tag works a bit like the hreflang tag, namely it prevents your mobile site from being viewed as duplicate content and should mean that your mobile URL is displayed in mobile SERPs and your desktop URL is displayed in desktop SERPs.

To implement (for more info see https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

on the desktop page, add:

and on the **corresponding **mobile page, the required annotation should be:

This rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required.

Make sure you are referencing the corresponding URLs (so www.example.com/xyz and m.example.com/xyz, rather than simply referencing the mobile homepage).

Hope that helps!

Hi,

Saijo and Bradley are right in saying that hiding elements on a smaller screen should not be an issue (as it's a correct implementation of responsive design). Bear in mind as well that there is a Googlebot and a Smartphone Googlebot, so as long as the Googlebot is seeing what desktop users see and the Smartphone Googlebot (which uses an iPhone5 user agent) is seeing what mobile users see, it shouldn't be a problem.

The only thing I would add:

If you are going to use display:none to prevent a user from seeing something when they view your site, it's good to include an option to 'view full site' or 'view desktop site'. Also in that case I would question whether you actually need that content on the desktop site at all? Because best practice is to provide all the same content regardless of device.

If it's hidden but still accessible to the mobile user (in a collapsible div for instance) there's no cloaking involved so it shouldn't cause a problem.

As a side note: the Vary HTTP header is really for a dynamically served website (that is, a single URL which checks user agent and then serves the desktop HTML to desktop devices and mobile HTML to mobile devices).

Hope that helps!

Hi Pugh,

Glad to hear it! Yes, you should also implement the tag on your homepages.

Hi Judd,

If you are only hiding these elements on the mobile view, this shouldn't cause an issue from a rankings perspective. You will want to make sure that they can access your CSS file (sometimes CSS files are blocked from crawlers).

It is possible that having it hidden will mean they discount that content slightly for the mobile version, but as long as they know it's a mobile version of the desktop site they will primarily take the desktop signals into consideration when it comes to rankings (with a small boost for mobile-friendliness in the mobile SERPs).

Once the mobile-first index rolls out this will change but they have stated that with mobile-first indexing, hiding content for space reasons won't negatively impact how they weight that content, so that shouldn't affect your approach practically speaking.

I have to disagree with the above.

Google absolutely can view mobile content, in fact they have a separate crawler that spoofs a mobile user agent in order to crawl mobile content. They may not have a separate mobile index of that content, but that has nothing to do with whether they view, crawl, and index mobile pages. We know that they do, in fact, given that whether a page is mobile-friendly is a rankings factor for mobile search results.

To answer your question - having the content collapsed shouldn't be a problem as long as the content is viewable with Javascript and CSS disabled. If Javascript is required to expand the collapsed content, the mobile crawler may not be able to see this content. You may want to test the page(s) with the Mobile-friendly Testing Tool and also try a Fetch and Render (for Smartphone) of the mobile page, to see how Google sees the page(s).