Transitioning to responsive design--should we re-direct m.?
-
We are moving to responsive design--should we 301 re-direct all of the old m.domain URLs to the corresponding domain.com
-
Very well elaborated, maybe I should have done so myself in my original response.
Always try 301 to relevant pages in this situation but if the redirect rules prove a headache (and the site has little to no inbound links) to create then I would simply remove the subdomain and 301 to main domain homepage. Somewhat of a Time vs Overall Benefit issue, or in some cases a Cost vs Benefit issue.
If the m.domain variant has links pointing to it then it's always beneficial to 301 the links the refering sites are pointing to - I'd try to do this as an absolute minimum in this situation.
It is common for mobile versions of sites have no links pointing to them apart from redirects from the main site so in that situation a 301would likely have zero affect whatsoever.
-
I would 2nd William's response here. If there are any links/bookmarks pointing to your mobile pages, you'll want those 301s in the long term. And short term, any pages Googlebot mobile has indexed that are getting mobile search referrals will pass those users along accordingly (and signal to Google to update their index).
In short, yes - 301s would be the way to go.
One caveat: if it's a big undertaking to do this (if you can't match all subdomain requests with a .htaccess redirect pattern and you have a ton of pages, for example) I'd first take a look at the mobile search traffic, referral traffic and inbound links to your m. subdomain. This way you can determine how much you'll be losing out on if you don't set up the 301s. If your mobile site is new enough, not getting a tremendous amount of traffic and has no direct referral sources or inbound links, you may be able to get away without 301ing. I'd probably still push for them though.
-
Redirecting the old mobile version of your site to the new responsive design with 301 redirects would pass on any page authority to the corresponding page on domain.com and a responsive design is generally superior in terms of UX.
In my opinion it would be good practice to forward from an exiting mobile version to a new responsive version as per the serve one page to all devices guideline. Using a 301 redirect would be the correct way to do this.
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
-
One Page Design / Single Product Page
I have been working in a project. Create a framework for multi pages that I have So here is the case
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Roman-Delcarmen
Most of them are single page product / one page design wich means that I dont have many pages to optimize. All this sites/ pages follow the rules of a landing page optimization because my main goals is convert as many users as I can. At this point I need to optimize the SEO, the basic stuff such as header, descriptions, tittles ect. But most of my traffic is generated by affiliates, which is good beacuse I dont have to worrie to generate traffic but if the affiliate network banned my product, then I lose all my traffic. Put all my eggs in the same basket is not a good idea. Im not an seo guru so that is the reason Im asking whic strategies and tactics can give me results. All kind of ideas are welcome1 -
Ranking Spanish website in Spain, but I'm based in Australia!
| Hello guys,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wajdisawaqed
I hope you all doing well.I just signed up to this great forum to get some answers on my current SEO campaign, I hope I can find some help in here. I have very important question I hope some of SEO experts can help me please, it will mean the world to me. SO I'm trying to rank this clean,originally Spanish expired domain that I bought in Auction for big money. I added a lot of original content, some keywords start ranking already without any backlinks as the website has huge authority and a lot of quality backlinks, so now I want to start building backlinks to get my keywords on the first page. My question:
I'm a bit worry about installing Google analytics on my site as I will be using gmail account thats based in Australia as I had to use Australian phone number to verify the account. What do you think? is it safe to do that ? (having google account based in Australia linked to website that I'm trying to rank in Spain) I would really appreciate an accurate answer, if you are not sure or if you have never done it before, please don't give me any expectations, as I'm investing a lot of money in this project. Any help would be extremely appreciated my friends. The other question is:
I have bought couple of "new domains" and added some content, to add those domains to my PBN, just to mix up the link profile on my money site. How long do you wait on new domain name before you build any backlinks? I've already added content and social profiles to the new sites, I just need to know when can I start building backlinks to them to power them up as they are new. Thank you so much in advance, I'm looking forward to hear some opinions from experts. Thank you |1 -
Is it possible to direct HTTP www 301 to HTTPS non www?
I have a question that has been stumping me and if someone could help I would gladly buy your coffee for a month. I have a website that used to be www and http a year or two ago. Now it is https and non www. A lot of my older links point to the www and http version of my site. This results in two 301 redirects. I.e. A link on another site to my site points to http://www.mysite.com The network waterfall shows: http://www.mysite.com 301 -> http://mysite.com http://mysite.com 301 -> https://mysite.com https://mysite.com (finally) **2 part question. ** **--Do you think that this two 301 redirect hop would affect SEO performance? I can see it did affect page authority through Moz. ** --Is there away around this? I.e. to redirect http:// AND http://www directly to https:// with no hops in between. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stodzy0 -
Redirecting M Dot Mobile Website to Responsive Design Website Questions
Hi amazing Moz community 🙂 Couldn't find this question anywhere, and knew this was the place to ask! We are helping a client redirect an M Dot website to a Responsive Design website. We want to retain our mobile rankings for keywords. Three questions - We should use 301 redirects from the M Dot website to the new website correct? (not 302s?) How long does it take for Google to understand that we have launched a responsive website? Can we remove the 301 redirects after a few days (if the M Dot website interferes/breaks the new Responsive website)? We have verified an account on Google Search Console for the M Dot website, along with a mobile sitemap that has been submitted and verified. What should we do with this M Dot GSC account? Just delete it? Or keep it and upload the NEW XML Sitemap with the new WWW links (because the website is responsive). THANK YOU!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Looking for re-assurance on this one: Sitemap approach for multi-subdomains
Hi All: Just looking for a bit of "yeah it'll be fine" reassurance on this before we go ahead and implement: We've got a main accommodation listing website under www.* and a separate travel content site using a completely different platform on blog.* (same domain - diffn't sub-domain). We pull in snippets of content from blog.* > www.* using a feed and we have cross-links going both ways, e.g. links to find accommodation in blog articles and links to blog articles from accommodation listings. Look-and-feel wise they're fully integrated. The blog.* site is a tab under the main nav. What i'd like to do is get Google (and others) to view this whole thing as one site - and attribute any SEO benefit of content on blog.* pages to the www.* domain. Make sense? So, done a bit of reading - and here's what i've come up with: Seperate sitemaps for each, both located in the root of www site www.example.com/sitemap-www www.example.com/sitemap-blog robots.txt in root of www site to have single sitemap entry: sitemap : www.example.com/sitemap-www robots.txt in root of blog site to have single sitemap entry: sitemap: www.example.com/sitemap-blog Submit both sitemaps to Webmaster tools. Does this sound reasonable? Any better approaches? Anything I'm missing? All input appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AABAB0 -
I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out why google stopped crawling.. any help is appreciated
This is going to be kind of long, simply because there is a background to the domain name that is not typical to anybody in the world really and I'm not sure if its possible that it was penalized or ranked lower because of that or not. Because of that I'm going to include it with the hopes that giving the full picture some nice soul in the world who has more knowledge in this than me see's something or knows something and can point me in the right direction. Our site has been around for a few years, at one point the domain was seized by homeland security ICE, and then they had to give it back in Dec. which sparked a lot of the SOPA PIPA stuff and we became the poster child so to speak. The site had previously been up since 2008, but due to that whole mess the site was down for 13 months on the dreaded seized server with a scary warning graphic and site title which caused quite obviously a bunch of 404 errors and who knows what else damage to anything we'd had before that as far as page rank and incoming links. we had a lot of incoming links from high quality sites. We were advised upon getting the domain back to pretty much scrap all the old content that was on the site prior and just start fresh.. which we did. Googlebot started crawling slowly, but then as we started getting back into the swing of things people started linking to us,some with high page rank, we were getting indexed quite frequently and ranking high on search results in our niche.. Then something happened on March 4th, we had arguably our best day with google traffic, we'd been linked back by places like Huff Post etc for content in our niche.. and the next day literally it was a freefall. Darn near nothing. I've attached a screen shot from webmaster tools so you can see how drastic it was. I went crazy, trying to figure out what was wrong, searching obsessively through webmaster tools looking for any indication of a problem, searched the site on google site:dajaz1.com and what comes up is page 2 page 3 page 45 page 46. It's also taken to indexing our category and tag pages and even our search pages. I've now set those all to noindex follow but when I look at where the googlebots are at on the site, they're on the categories, pages, author pages, and tags. Some of our links are still getting indexed, but doing a search just of our site name and we're ranking below many of the media sites that have written about our legal issues, when a month ago we were at least top result for our own name. I've racked my brain trying to figure out the issue. I've disabled plugins, I'm on fetch as google bot all the time making sure our stuff is at least coming out as 200 (we had 2 days where we were getting 403 errors due to a super-cache issue, but once fixed googlebot returned like it never left) I've literally watched 1000 videos, read 100 forums, added in SEO plugins, tried to optimize the site to the point I'm worried I'm over doing it.. and still they've barely begun to crawl. As you can see there is some activity in the last 2-3 days, but even submitting a new site map once I changed the theme out of desperation it's only indexed 16. I've looked for errors all through webmaster tools and I can't find anything to tell me why that happened, how to fix it, and how to get googlebot to like us again. I'm pulling my hair out here. The links we have incoming are high quality links like huffington post , spin, complex, etc. Those haven't slowed down at all, we do outgoing links to sites we trust and are high quality as well. I've got interns working on how they're writing titles and such, I've gone through and attempted to fix duplicate pages and titles.. I've been going through and re-writing meta description tags What am I missing? I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out what the issue is. Eternally grateful for any help provided. jnzb6.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | malady0 -
Design features as a ranking factor?
i created a new design of my website, very clean and highly orientated towards conversion. its a far better looking site than the old one but the navigation is almost the same. a few days after i uploaded the new site we were ranked number 1 on the biggest keyphrase in my industry. Does google crawl design feature, maybe with something like conversion heat mapping software and include that as a ranking factor? love your thoughts on this one.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corgi2 -
Apache not directing to 404?
I have a PHP website that produces an actual page when /index.php/GarbageURL/MoreDirectories/Page.suffix/DirectoryAgain is typed in a browser. Why? How? For what purpose? The content and HTML is produced in the source, but the images and css are broken due to the location of the file, obvi. I don't understand what this default tendency is for.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bombbomb0