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 -
My page ranking dropped after I made it responsive
Recently, I made one of my site page responsive. It was ranking on 13th Position and after I made the page responsive, it dropped to 24 desktop and 35 on mobile rankings. I ran mobile friendly test and it said "awesome, your page is mobile friendly". Not sure, what went wrong here. Page in question is: https://www.itcontractorsuk.com/ Can someone please advice? Please Note: My site is partially responsive.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThinkWebUK0 -
Making unresponsive site responsive, should I expect any ranking penalties?
Hello, I have a website made with asp.net and ranking quite well for a number of competitive keywords like in google top 10 results for more than a dozen competitive keywords. Recently in order for better user experience, I am having it developed so it is fully responsive for all screen resolutions. Basically all the design element / site text will remain the same including color scheme / layout etc outwardly but internally this will change everything all the css / page html (tables converted to divs) etc. Now my question is: 1. Will this considered by bots a complete site overhaul and ranking will take a hit even if I stay with current platform i.e. asp.net? 2. While making design responsive I can also develop a wordpress theme, which will make it easier to work with the website as the site does not require any programming. So if I also change the platform like from MS IIS/asp to Apache / php how will search engine bots take this? 3. If above in fact will result in ranking drop, how much time will it take for the rankings to get back to normal? Note that I use extensionless urls so the urls will remain the same as well even if we convert from asp to php. Sorry for long details but question is bugging me from weeks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hpk0 -
301 Directs
We have found a lot of 404 error pages that we have transferred with 301 directs. My questions is, should these 301 directs be marked as a NF (nofollow)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Essential-Pest0 -
Should we include a canonical or noindex on our m. (mobile) pages?
According to https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details, we should include a canonicalicalize back to our desktop version of the URL, but what if that desktop URL is noindexed? Should the m. version be noindexed as well? Or is it fine to leave it as a canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
I'm I being penalize? I fell off SERP for main keyword
I have been making minor changes to my site like fixing 404 pages and adding site maps etc. I have ranked as high as 3rd for the query 'private equity firms' but now Im showing the site around the 10th page and some times never. any ideas what could be going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nicktaylor10 -
Looking for SEO & design help
Our website is www.mosquitocurtains.com built by an amateur (me). Traffic has been on the decline, slipping from enviable rankings, higher bounce rates. Of course I have a modest budget but can't seem to sift through those that say, "Pay us a bundle and cross your fingers that we're any good."
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kurtyj0 -
I'm not sure why SEOMoz is reporting duplicate content
I have thousands of duplicate page content errors on my site, but I'm not exactly sure why. For example, the crawl is reporting this page - http://www.fantasytoyland.com/2011-glee-costumes.html is a duplicate of this page - http://www.fantasytoyland.com/2011-jersey-shore-costumes.html . All of these products are unique to the page - what is causing it to flag as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FutureMemoriesInc0