URL Errors for SmartPhone in Google Search Console/Webmaster Tools
-
Howdy all,
In recent weeks I have seen a steady increase in the number of smartphone related url errors on Googles Search Console (formerly webmaster tools).
THe crawler appears to be searching for a /m/ or /mobile/ directory within the URLs. Why is it doing this? Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately this is for an unresponsive site, would setting the viewport help stop the issue for know until my new responsive site is launched shortly.
Cheers fello Mozzers
Tim
-
Haha, you wrote this as I was writing my reply to you both below. Yup! That earlier Q&A is a great resource. Screaming Frog should give you insight into where the links might have gone bad. 301 redirection is always an option as well for the few links that may be causing issues. Cheers!
-
Have you tried running something like Screaming Frog to see if you can duplicate the 404s? http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/broken-link-checker/ That might give you greater visibility into this. Beyond that I'd do Google searches on the various plugins you have running to see if they do something similar to that Yoast example regarding partially publishing draft content. It's likely that you'll find someone with a similar issue at some point in the past.
If you want greater insight from the community, post the URLs here and people will be able to investigate directly. Best of luck!
-
I have just found this post which seems to outline most of my issues.
See here. Although I am not sure it will help you or not Trenton. I am going to do a little Screaming Frog search to see if there is an errand link.
-
I too am using Yoast and still getting these troublesome errors on GSC. We also do a lots of draft posting, but for me the error is not solely restricted to an area of our site that uses wordpress, it happens globally to our site.
I have checked the sitemaps on both desktop and mobile and both are returning the same for me.
-
Looks exactly the same on my phone as it does on desktop. The pages coming up as 404s in GSC under Smartphone are NOT listed on this page-sitemap.xml page.
-
I am using Yoast but I am only using the Page sitemap, and it is the only one I have submitted for the affected sites. Again, this doesn't really explain why it's coming up under Smartphone and not Desktop. Also, Google does tell you where these are linking from, and it does say the sitemap page, but when i looked at the sitemap page, these pages are not listed. I am looking at them on my desktop though and not my smartphone. If I looked at the /page-sitemap.xml page on my phone would it look any different? :::quickly picks up his phone and tests it out:::
-
Without looking at the specific site in question my guess is that the draft is publishing some amount of its content to either a sitemap or other area of your site that is then prompting a crawl from Google. This is sometimes an issue with various plugins, for example Yoast was doing this with the attachment-sitemap.xml a while ago, see: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/sitemap-probelm (last comment).
Aside from files such as these, you could run a crawler like Screaming Frog or Xenu to help track down which locations might be pointing to the 404 pages. Cheers!
-
I'm seeing similar issues. I was going to post a question, but found this when I searched.
I'm using Wordpress and I have some theme pages that I have set as drafts, so that I can access them on my end, but the public would get a 404. In Google Search Console, under Desktop, none of these pages are coming up. But under Smartphone, somehow Google is finding these unpublished draft URLs as 404 Not Found errors.
My question is why is Google seeing these pages, and also why it's triggering on Smartphone only and not desktop. And my last question is the obvious one: how do I fix this!?
Thanks!
-
Hi Tim. Can you share the domain name that is experiencing these errors? If it's private, feel free to DM it.
Broadly, I'd look for any backlinks that are pointed at a missing /m/ or /mobile/ folder, sitemaps that are pointing at such, internal links that are doing likewise. If the site is completely new and unresponsive I'd do as you suggested yourself and throttle down the crawlers until you're ready to fully launch. Cheers!
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
-
Submitting URLs After New Search Console
Hi Everyone I wanted to see how people submit their urls to Google and ensure they are all being indexed. I currently have an ecommerce site with 18,000 products. I have sitemaps setup, but noticed that the various product pages haven't started ranking yet. If I submit the individual url through the new Google Search Console I see the page ranking in a matter of minutes. Before the new Google Search Console you could just ask Google to Fetch/Render an XML sitemap and ask it to crawl all the links. I don't see the same functionality working today on Google Search Console and was wondering if there are any new techniques people could share. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abiondo
Anthony1 -
"No Information Available" Error for Homepage in Google
Hi Everyone, Been racking my brain around this one. Not sure why it is happening. Basically Google is showing the "www" version of the homepage, when 99% of the site is "non-www". It also says "No Information Available". I have tried submitting it through GSC, but it is telling me it is blocked through the Robots.txt file. I don't see anything in there that would block it. Any ideas? shorturl.at/bkpyG I would like to get it to change to the regular "non-www" and actually be able to show information.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Reverse image search tools for link building?
Hi Guys, Looking for reverse image search tools for link building. I want to dump 1000s of images into the tool, so it can find their usage across the web. I have tried picmatch.ca but their support is not great and Tinyeye. Are there any recommended reverse image search tools recommended here on Moz? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robincar0l0 -
Decreased organic traffic but increased Webmaster Tool Queries
We have a client who has had a significant decrease in organic traffic this last month (about 20%) but in Webmaster tools it tells me there was an increase in impressions and clicks. How can these both be accurate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jfeitlinger0 -
Ranking Google News - 3 digits in URL?
Do we need to have unique 3 digits in URL, like stated here in technical guidelines from Google -- https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en&ref_topic=4359866. Or, is having and submitting Google News XML Sitemap a way around that -- https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/68323?hl=en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bonnierSEO0 -
Webmaster Tools Content Keywords & Meta Tagging
In Webmaster tools , Content keywords give an indication of what Google thinks a site is about. This site is a health site ( online shopping - health supplements ) - but one of the terms it thinks the site is about is "Dollar" . I'm guessing this is because on every page there is Currency Selection from multiple currencies. How do I tell Google that this part of the page is nothing to do with what my site is about? Thanks for your reply in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Penalized for "Unnatural Links" on Webmaster Tools
Has anyone ever logged in to Google Webmaster tools and seen a message about them seeing unnatural links (as a warning) Our homepage lost all its rankings. I will submit a reconsideration request. We don't engage in link buying practices (some directories, thats all.) Any feedback, please? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulDylan0 -
Does Google penalize for having a bunch of Error 404s?
If a site removes thousands of pages in one day, without any redirects, is there reason to think Google will penalize the site for this? I have thousands of subcategory index pages. I've figured out a way to reduce the number, but it won't be easy to put in redirects for the ones I'm deleting. They will just disappear. There's no link juice issue. These pages are only linked internally, and indexed in Google. Nobody else links to them. Does anyone think it would be better to remove the pages gradually over time instead of all at once? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Interesting.com0