Mobile site is not ranking in the mobile search results
-
I posted last month about problems with a mobile site, which is served from a separate URL (m.mydomain.com) as currently responsive design is not an option.
The problem was that the mobile site was being returned in the desktop index along with the desktop site, and the desktop site was being returned in the mobile index instead of the mobile site.
I have therefore implemented rel=canonical and rel=alternate as is advised by Google, but this has stopped the desktop site from appearing in the mobile index, but hasn't caused the mobile site to rank instead.
What should I do now? One idea I have is to remove the rel=canonical and rel=alternate links so that the desktop site ranks in the mobile index again. There is a redirect in place anyway so when people click on a desktop link from a mobile search, they will still be redirected to the mobile equivalent.
I could then set the m.mydomain.com to noindex to stop it from being returned in the desktop results and potentially causing duplicate content issues?
What do you think about this as a work around?
-
Hi, I'm wondering what implementation you used for the rel=canonical? I'm very surprised to hear that adding the tags negatively impacted the mobile site's ranking in the mobile SERPs; all it should have done is change the URL to the m. version.
I would not recommend the workaround you suggested, as redirecting a ranking and indexed page to a noindexed page (let alone several noindexed pages) will most likely cause confusion for the crawler.
-
Thanks for the suggestion Anders. I have considered this, although other advice suggests googlebot should not be blocked.
I have now managed to get Google analytics set up for the mobile domain. Before I had been relying on webmaster tools which for some reason is reporting that there is no traffic landing on my m.domain.com, whereas GA shows that it is now getting traffic from mobile and not desktop, as desired. So even though the mobile urls are ranking in the desktop results, users are not landing on them.
-
Hi!
Have you considered blocking googlebot from the mobile site, only allowing googlebot-mobile to crawl the site? And vice versa for the desktop site? See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943?hl=en for a list of googlebots...
Best regards,
Anders
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
-
Please help me figure out if my website is penalized? It is not in the search result page for the phrase that is original to it.
I just searched Google for the phrase that is original to my website (yourappliancerepairla.com😞 "LG actually has a very large and well respected home appliances business", and Google didn't bring my website at all. Does this mean that my website is penalized?
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Goolge: Mobile friendliness is now a ranking factor on Mobile
John Mueller from Google has just confirmed: Google has just confirmed that mobile friendliness is now a ranking factor for people on smartphones. The date it goes live is 24th April 2015. There is a great presentation on the hangout - which will be available later to watch and once its available I will update with a link - but I would make sure your checking webmaster tools for any alerts / messages if you care about smartphone users. What do people recommend, regarding responsive vs mobile site vs dynamic serving. Is your site ready? What are you planning on doing since the update has been announced.
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday1 -
Mobile site domain authority
Hello, I think this may be a coding issue, but hoping someone can help me. I am still having issues with our mobile site ranking, even though we created redirects/canonical to identify similar content between desktop version and mobile. I did notice through MOZ analysis of backlinks that we have no domain authority. If the mobile site is automatically detected dependent on the user, shouldn't we also have the same domain authority? How does that work exactly? How can we build up the domain authority for our mobile site? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | lfrazer0 -
Pointing Other URL to My Site? Good or bad for ranking.
A few years ago I purchased a few keyword rich domain names and set up some satellite sites. Spammy I now know. What should I do now? I own the domain names for at least another 3 years. Should I point them to my main site or would that hurt my main site ranking?
Technical SEO | | caisson0 -
Will sitemap generated in Yoast for a combined wordpress/magento site map entire site ?
Hi For an ecommerce site thats been developed via a combination of wordpress and magento and has yoast installed, will the sitemap (& other yoast features) map (& apply to) the entire site or just wordpress aspects ? In other words does one need to do anything else to have a full sitemap for a combined magento/wordpress site or will Yoast cover it all ? This link seems to suggest should be fine but seeing if anyone else encountered this and had problems or if straightforward ? http://fishpig.co.uk/wordpress-integration/docs/plugins.html cheers dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Mobile site - allow robot traffic
Hi, If a user comes to our site from a mobile device, we redirect to our mobile site. That is www.mysite/mypage redirects to m.mysite/mypage. Right now we are blocking robots from crawling our m. site. Previously there were concerns the m. site could rank for normal browser searches. To make sure this isn't a problem we are planning on rel canonical our m. site pages and reference the www pages (mobile is just a different version of our www site). From my understanding having a mobile version of a page is a ranking factor for mobile searches so allowing robots is a good thing. Before doing so, I wanted to see if anyone had any other suggestions/feedback (looking for potential pitfalls, issues etc)
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
Why did our site drop in Google rankings?
My site's URL (web address) is: http://tinyurl.com/3svn2l9 Hi there, We operate a travel site that lists numerous tours, accommodation and activities. Since 6th August 2011 we have dropped from top 10 SERP rankings of our pages to around result number 100 (page 10) and losing massive amount of visitors via Google Search. Our Yahoo and Bing rankings are still in the top10. We need your advice and quick! The last changes we have made are the following: -redirected the non-www version to the www version on the 1st August -bought advertising with a follow link in a sidebar that is being populated across the site (+4000 pages) about 2 months ago -added a blog to the website 2 weeks ago and posted 2 posts to date. Additionally, our website structure allows visitors (and bots) to see the same listings via different URLs which caused duplicate content. This has been the case since the launch of our website about 1 year ago. To prevent this duplicate content we have placed canonical tags on the individual listings pages. Why did our site all of a sudden plummet in the rankings?
Technical SEO | | Robbern0