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).