Robots.txt & Mobile Site
-
Background - Our mobile site is on the same domain as our main site. We use a folder approach for our mobile site abc.com/m/home.html We are re-directing traffic to our mobile site vie device detection and re-direction exists for a handful of pages of our site ie most of our pages do not redirect the user to a mobile equivalent page.
Issue – Our mobile pages are being indexed in desktop Google searches
Input Required – How should we modify our robots.txt so that the desktop google index does not index our mobile pages/urls
User-agent:
Googlebot-Mobile
Disallow: /m
User-agent: `YahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2`
Disallow: /m
User-agent: `MSNBOT_Mobile`
Disallow: /m
Many thanks
-
Hi,
The fact that you do not have mobile versions for all pages of the site makes your case a bit of an odd one when it comes to best practices. I would recommend if at all possible to address this and make all pages available in mobile format also.
If for whatever reason this is not possible then I think you are better off using a meta robots tag NOINDEX to get your mobile results out of the serps completely and a rel canonical to the relevant desktop page to make extra sure there are no issues with duplicate content.
If you can get all pages into a mobile version then you will want to implement proper redirects based on user string as you are doing, and also implement rel alternate/canonical tags between the desktop and mobile pages of the site (which should make sure the right version of the site shows up in the relevant serps). For more details on the whole setup check:
http://moz.com/blog/how-to-optimize-a-mobile-site and
http://moz.com/blog/mobile-seo-process -
User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Disallow: /m
would't that statement prevent Googlebot-Mobile from crawling the mobile pages ? Why would you want to do that ?
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
-
Utilizing one robots.txt for two sites
I have two sites that are facilitated hosting in similar CMS. Maybe than having two separate robots.txt records (one for every space), my web office has made one which records the sitemaps for the two sites, similar to this:
Technical SEO | | eulabrant0 -
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Why is robots.txt blocking URL's in sitemap?
Hi Folks, Any ideas why Google Webmaster Tools is indicating that my robots.txt is blocking URL's linked in my sitemap.xml, when in fact it isn't? I have checked the current robots.txt declarations and they are fine and I've also tested it in the 'robots.txt Tester' tool, which indicates for the URL's it's suggesting are blocked in the sitemap, in fact work fine. Is this a temporary issue that will be resolved over a few days or should I be concerned. I have recently removed the declaration from the robots.txt that would have been blocking them and then uploaded a new updated sitemap.xml. I'm assuming this issue is due to some sort of crossover. Thanks Gaz
Technical SEO | | PurpleGriffon0 -
Best use of robots.txt for "garbage" links from Joomla!
I recently started out on Seomoz and is trying to make some cleanup according to the campaign report i received. One of my biggest gripes is the point of "Dublicate Page Content". Right now im having over 200 pages with dublicate page content. Now.. This is triggerede because Seomoz have snagged up auto generated links from my site. My site has a "send to freind" feature, and every time someone wants to send a article or a product to a friend via email a pop-up appears. Now it seems like the pop-up pages has been snagged by the seomoz spider,however these pages is something i would never want to index in Google. So i just want to get rid of them. Now to my question I guess the best solution is to make a general rule via robots.txt, so that these pages is not indexed and considered by google at all. But, how do i do this? what should my syntax be? A lof of the links looks like this, but has different id numbers according to the product that is being send: http://mywebshop.dk/index.php?option=com_redshop&view=send_friend&pid=39&tmpl=component&Itemid=167 I guess i need a rule that grabs the following and makes google ignore links that contains this: view=send_friend
Technical SEO | | teleman0 -
Site Crawl
I was wondering if there was a way to use SEOmoz's tool to quickly and easily find all the URLs on you site and not just the ones with errors. The site that I am working on does not have a site map. What I am trying to do is find all the URLs along with their titles and description tags. Thank you very much for your help
Technical SEO | | pakevin0 -
Robots.txt and 301
Hi Mozzers, Can you answer something for me please. I have a client and they have 301 re-directed the homepage '/' to '/home.aspx'. Therefore all or most of the linkjuice is being passed which is great. They have also marked the '/' as nofollow / noindex in the Robots.txt file so its not being crawled. My question is if the '/' is being denied access to the robots is it still passing on the authority for the links that go into this page? It is a 301 and not 302 so it would work under normal circumstances but as the page is not being crawled do I need to change the Robots.txt to crawl the '/'? Thanks Bush
Technical SEO | | Bush_JSM0 -
Quick robots.txt check
We're working on an SEO update for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk at the moment, and I was wondering if someone could take a quick look at the new robots file (http://gearzone.affinitynewmedia.com/robots.txt) to make sure we haven't missed anything? Thanks
Technical SEO | | neooptic0