Removal tool - no option to choose mobile vs desktop. Why?
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Google's removal tool doesn't give a person the option to tell them which index - mobile friendly, or desktop/laptop - the url should be removed from. Why?
I may have a fundamental misunderstanding. The way I thought it works is that when you have a dynamically generated page based on the user agent, (ie, the SAME URL but different formatting for smartphones as for desktop/laptop) then the Google mobile bot will index the mobile friendly version and the desktop bot will index the desktop version -- so Google will have 2 different indexed results for the same url. That SEEMS to be validated by the existence of the words 'mobile-friendly' next to some of my mobile friendly page descriptions on mobile devices.
HOWEVER, if that's how it works--why would Google not allow a person to remove one of the urls and keep the other? Is it because Google thinks a mobile version of a website must have all of the identical pages as the desktop version? What if it doesnt? What if a website is designed so that some of the slower pages simply aren't given a mobile version? Is it possible that Google doesn't really save results for a mobile friendly page if there is a corresponding desktop page-- but only checks to see if it renders ok? That is, it keeps only one indexed copy of each url, and basically assumes the mobile title and actual content is the same and only the formatting is different? That assumption isn't always true -- mobile devices lend themselves to different interactions with the user - but it certainly could save Google billions of dollars in storage.
Thoughts?
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Thanks for your reply, but the link you pointed me to isn't my situation. I'm not redirecting to separate urls. Mine is this: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/dynamic-serving
I HAVE to figure out what Google is doing in my situation because if I don't and I assume wrong, then lots of pages for either my desktop or mobile friendly won't be indexed.
Surely lots of website owners have had their developers create a minimal mobile friendly site with less content and pages than desktop users get and chosen the dynamic-serving approach, but I have yet to receive a reply from anyone who has faced that issue..It's a very serious issue for me because either I have to consider dumping the dynamic serving in favor of separate mobile urls (if that would work), or I have to do a ton of programming to add in content so that all the urls have both mobile and desktop content.
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**There's a lengthy discussion on it here: **https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/separate-urls?hl=en
Notably this section:
For Googlebot, we do not have any preference and recommend that webmasters consider their users when deciding on their redirection policy. The most important thing is to serve correct and consistent redirects, i.e. redirect to the equivalent content on the desktop or mobile site. If your configuration is wrong, some users may not be able to see your content at all.
In my opinion, trying to figure out what Google does on the backend is a losing proposition. Maybe they index both; maybe they index one. Heck, there's no way to know if they even index full text now for every site. There's certainly a lot of optimization going on in the back-end that is above and beyond our purview as SEO practitioners.
Google says they don't care what kind of redirect you use for mobile. Likely, that means your mobile sites are being semantically linked to your desktop version of the pages -- they specifically recommend against pointing two separate page redirects to the same mobile page. They recommend that you add a link that lets mobile users click over to desktop for usability. That's good enough for me.
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