Mobile site ranking in desktop searches
-
A robots.txt file is properly implemented on the mobile site to block Googlebot from crawling, yet, when running a site: query for the site in google, it still returns over 104,000 pages from the mobile site in the index.
Why could this be happening?
-
I have thse recomendations:
1. Specify your Doctype to help Google see what your content type is. For mobile Google supports XHTML Basic, XHTML Mobile Profile, XHTML, WML, cHTML (iMode), and EZweb (KDDI). We run HTML 5, CSS 3 and jQuery successfully but these are not specified by google, so i would recommend to be safe and go with what Google supports.
2. Add a specialized XML Sitemap for Mobile. It is basically the same as the usual Sitemap apart from adding these to elements: xmlns:mobile="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0 and mobile:mobileRead more here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34648</mobile:mobile>
P.S. Name it mobilesitemap.xml.
3. Use WURFL to redirect PC users finding mobi content in the www index back to the PC version.
That should help.
-
If you haven't asked a question in private Q&A yet this month, you can ask there and share your URL, as that is private and available to only SEOmoz staff and associates.
Have you gone into GWT and requested removal of the site? If you verify the site, and then have the site/directory blocked via robots.txt, you can use the removal tool to request removal rather than waiting for things to drop out of the index.
-
Thanks for responding Keri!
I can confirm that there are no parameters overriding the robots.txt within the code. I also can confirm that there is nothing amiss with the verification of the robots.txt.
Also, unfortunately, due to the nature of the client, we are unable to put the URL out there.
If you have any other thoughts, please do share. Sorry I couldn't be of more help.
Thank you.
-
How long has the robots.txt file been in place? If you added it just a few days ago, it takes time for things to get out of the index. Other thoughts are looking at the source code of the pages on the mobile site -- is there a robots parameter on the page that is overriding robots.txt?
Have you gone into GWT and used the robots verification tool there to make sure nothing was amiss?
If you can give us your URL, the community can take a look and see if they can figure anything out.
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
-
How to load the mobile version of a page without the desktop version in the background (and vice versa)
Let’s say your designer wants your homepage to be fairly image heavy. Then let’s say they want to use DIFFERENT images for desktop and mobile. You appease them and make this work. But now your homepage is slow (makes sense, right? It’s loading both sets of images but only displaying one set). You lazy load and compress but your home page takes SIX SECONDS to load. The rest of your site loads in just under two. This can only be having a negative impact on SEO. You won’t convince your designer to cut the images. What do you do? My immediate thought is to look for a way of only loading the content relevant to that screen size. Sure, it won’t reshuffle itself on desktop when you drag your Chrome window to the size of a phone. But who cares? We’re the only peope who do that anyway. Is this possible? Do you have any better ideas?
Technical SEO | | MSGroup0 -
Help! added WWW to wordpress site and now lost SEO ranking
Hi there Everyone! I have recently added a www to my wordpress website by going to settings>general and adding "www" to the wordpress address and the site address. After i did that i lost my SEO ranking, and also that MOZ is detecting that im getting site crawl issues stating that i have duplicate pages. an example is below: http://www.mefco.co.nz/news http://mefco.co.nz/news any ideas on how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | jfactor0 -
Why is my site ranking so poorly compared to my competition?
I own a car shipping business (www.carshippingcarriers.com) and I was ranking very high last year, but around the end of August our site lost a TON of rank. Afterwards I had my SEO team at the time (no longer working with them) do a complete overhaul of the website (rewrote content, combined many pages together so no duplicate content issue, made it mobile friendly, etc.. Since then we continue to still lose rankings on Google. Yahoo and Bing seem to keep performing decently, but Google we are getting destroyed. I have been a member of Moz for a few months and I have been using the open site to check my competitors and their linking profile. One in particular, www.joescarshipping.com, has been ranking extremely well and the site looks horrible, doesn't have many links, hardly a social media presence, etc.. Compared my my website which has ton of content, articles on our website, social profile is great (tons of Google+ usage), not a ton of links so a decent amount of links, etc.. Why would a company like that be ranking so high while I keep falling? Any advice or reasoning as to what is wrong or what could be done to get better rankings? I am just at my wits end on this matter. 😕
Technical SEO | | Dutko23851 -
Ranking not improving
Our site is now 3 months old (although the domain is older) but rankings don't seem to be improving at all. We've got some good quality relevant links coming into the site, and the content is unique and often updated. Is there something holding the site back? Am I being impatient? the site is www.help-my-mobility.org Thanks.
Technical SEO | | jj34340 -
How to turn WP site into Ecom site?
I have a couple of old wordpress sites that are old affiliate blogs. I currently sell products that are on amazon on these sites and sell quite a bit of volume. I have found a source and can afford the inventory to replace Amazon with my own product. So the dilema is how to turn these wordpress sites into ecommerce sites. The thing I am worried most about is that each site gets about 100-200 visitors a day for great buying keywords. I obviously don't want to lose my rankings. What are the options of turning a wordpress site into a store. I am not interested in plugins or some of the other solutions that make the store look very cheap and I would assume horribly convert. If you have inner pages ranking for keywords how does that work? Do the post pages become product pages? So to sum up I guess I am asking, what are the options that are of the higher quality that will also help me keep my rankings? Thanks
Technical SEO | | PEnterprises0 -
Optimize flash site
Hello, How can we optimize a site like this - http://www.ziba.com.au/ . The whole site is in flash. What are the alternatives ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
How long does it take for customized Google Site Search to show results from pdf files?
The site in question is http://www.ejmh.eu I am pretty unsatisfied with the results I am getting from the Site Search provided by Google. We have over 160 pdf files in this subfolder: http://www.ejmh.eu/mellekletek The files are the digital versions of articles. When I search for content in those pdf files, Google does not show results. It does show results from older pages, dating back 1-2 years but it is certainly not showing anything from pdf files that I have just put up 3 weeks ago. My questions: If I place a Google Search on a site, does it not automatically display results from ALL the content in the root domain? Is there any correlation between how the Site Search is indexing the files and how Google is indexing the urls in general? Should I just wait and see whether site search performance improves or should I switch to another Search software like Zoom Search? It is vital to have a proper, high-quality search functioning on that site in the very near future. What are your experiences? Any tips are greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Lauroca0
