Mobile site content and main site content
-
Help, pls! I have one main site and a mobile version of that site (m.domain.com). The main site has more pages, more content, different named urls. The main site has consistently done well in Google. The mobile site has not: the mobile site is buried.
I am working on adding more content to the mobile site, but am concerned about duplicate content. Could someone pls tell me the best way to deal with these two versions of our site? I can't use rel=canonical because the urls do not correspond to the same names on the main site, or can I? Does this mean I need to change the url names, offer different content (abridged), etc? I really am at a loss as to how to interpret Google's rules for this. Could someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? Any help or tips would GREATLY appreciated!!!!!
Thanks!
-
Hi Denise,
I would say you should treat a mobile user with the same content as a desktop one as they are there for the same reason- to access your site. Having said this you might find having just essential content for a user and a link to desktop for some of the other pages.
Obviously that's not helpful its down to preference. The way I would ask you to look at it is not from Google's point of view, but your users. What will give them the best experience?
If you want to rank the mobile site i would alter more content to be mobile optimized.
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks. I have seen this checklist in my research. My question is this, do I use the same amount of pages for a mobile version of my site and use the appropriate canonical redirects in order to be found? Right now, I have a small fraction of pages for our mobile site than our desktop site-the only pages with a canonical to alternate redirect are the home pages. I have read all the pages on the developer aspect of Google, used various checklists, but cannot for some reason, find a clear enough answer to go with. Could you or someone else help?
Thanks
-
Hi Denise,
you may find the recent Moz blog super helpful -
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your response. I did re-review this page and it looks like we need to expand our mobile site to include as many pages as our desktop site? Is this right? It used to be that mobile sites could have only a few pages and be fine... Any idea why now every mobile page url should correspond to an alternate desktop page url, or does it? That seems to be the only potential problem to me...
Thanks again!!!!
-
Hi Bill,
Thanks for your answer. I am wondering as per the guidelines in Google Developers on mobile sites if we should have a corresponding page on our m.website to our desktop version, and then show the alternate/canonical tags for each?
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details
Do I understand that correctly? Right now, we have about 15 pages for our mobile site and 78 pages on our main site...
Thanks for any feedback you can offer!
-
Hi Andy,
I know! This is my preference, and yet I get the feeling from our programming team that it would be too much work.. But thanks for the response and recommendation!!! Knowing little about coding, is there a simplified way to go from two separate sites to one responsive one that I could pass along to my programmer?
Thanks again!
-
Denise, I don't think you have too much to worry about when it comes to duplicate content. Google's crawler, Googlebot, has a mobile version and a desktop version: so you should be serving Googlebot's mobile version your mobile content and vice versa for the 'normal' desktop Googlebot.
That should generally take care of most of the duplicate content issues. I would, though, go ahead and take a look at this 2011 video from Matt Cutts and the link in the description that talks about mobile duplicate content issues.
-
Hello,
I did write a lovely response but the moz errors have killed that off so here is the shorter version :
Google is pretty cleaver at knowing a mobile site from a desktop version so i wouldn't worry too much but i recommend you take a good look in:
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/
you could also block the Google bot in your robots on your mobile site only allowing the mobile Google bot in (or visa versa)
Google bots - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943?hl=en
Hope that helps a bit.
-
Hi Denise,
Without looking at your site, I just wonder if a simpler solution would be to have someone fiddle with the CSS on your site and make it Responsive, rather than having a second site to contend with? You will retain your normal site rankings then and just have the site render differently depending upon the type of device.
This is the route I take with all of my clients, so if this isn't an option, then I am sorry but someone else will have to chip in.
-Andy
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
-
Site hit by algorthithmic update in October 2014 - filters and thin content queries.
Back in October 2014 last year, a site we are working with had a significant drop in organic traffic. This coincided with Google's algorithmic update. The side in question uses filters extensively and at the time did not have any canonical tags in place. The lions share of these filter pages had little or no written content just products. The website now has canonical tags throughout and content has started to be added to the top level categories and we will continue to add more, however there is still a large amount of pages with little or no content. Webmaster tools shows that there are large amounts of internal links (for instance 42,000+ to the homepage) which must be due to the filtered pages. I am looking for advice on what is the best way to proceed. Do I edit robots.txt, start adding no follow tags or something else entirely?
Technical SEO | | bfinternet0 -
Mobile website question
Hi Mozzers, A website I manage has a mobile friendly version of their main website and a /m version as well. I was wondering if anyone had any experience in the best way of handling this? Should we just get rid of the /m version and tag the mobile friendly version? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
Off-site company blog linking to company site or blog incorporated into the company site?
Kind of a SEO newbie, so be gentle. I'm a beginner content strategist at a small design firm. Currently, I'm working with a client on a website redesign. Their current website is a single page dud with a page authority of 5. The client has a word press blog with a solid URL name, a domain authority of 100 and page authority of 30. My question is this: would it be better for my client from an SEO perspective to: Re-skin their existing blog and link to the new company website with it, hopefully passing on some of its "Google Juice,"or... Create a new blog on their new website (and maybe do a 301 redirect from the old blog)? Or are there better options that I'm not thinking of? Thanks for whatever help you can give a newbie. I just want to take good care of my client.
Technical SEO | | TheKatzMeow0 -
Problem with duplicate pages due to mobile site.
Hey everyone, We've got an issue where our current shopping cart provider (Volusion) allows us to use canonical and rel="alternate" links, however the canonical links are forced on our Desktop as well as mobile pages. When they should only be on the mobile pages. You can view what I mean at the below two pages: http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/fgd400-sensaphone400-p/fgd400.htm https://www.absoluteautomation.ca/mobile/Product.aspx?ProductCode=FGD400 Does anyone have any ideas in terms of working around this?
Technical SEO | | absoauto0 -
How to link site.com/blog or site.com/blog/
Hello friends, I have a very basic question but I can not find the right answer... I have made my blog linkbuilding using the adress "mysite.com/blog" but now im not sure if is better to do the linkbuilding to "mysite.com**/blog/ "** Is there any diference? Thanks...
Technical SEO | | lans27870 -
Duplicate content vs. less content
Hi, I run a site that is currently doing very well in google for the terms that we want. We are 1,2 or 3 for our 4 targeted terms, but havent been able to jump to number one in two categories that I would really like to. In looking at our site, I didn't realize we have a TON of duplicate content as seen by SEO moz and I guess google. It appears to be coming from our forum, we use drupal. RIght now we have over 4500 pages of duplicate content. Here is my question: How much is this hurting us as we are ranking high. Is it better to kill the forum (which is more community service than business) and have a very tight site SEO-wise, or leave the forum even with the duplicate content. Thanks for your help. Erik
Technical SEO | | SurfingNosara0 -
Copying Content With Permission
Hi, we received an email about a guy who wants to copy and paste our content on his website, he says he will keep all the links we put there and give us full credit for it, so besides keeping all the links on the page, which is the best way for him to give us the credit? a link to the original article? an special meta tag? what? Thank you PS.Our site its much more authorative than his and we get indexed within 10min from the moment we publish a page, so I don't worry about him out raking us with our own content.
Technical SEO | | andresgmontero0 -
Duplicate Content Penalties, International Sites
We're in the process of rolling out a new domestic (US) website design. If we copy the same theme/content to our International subsidiaries, would the duplicate content penalty still apply? All International sites would carry the Country specific domain, .co.uk, .eu, etc. This question is for English only content, I'm assuming translated content would not carry a penalty.
Technical SEO | | endlesspools0