Mobile SEO best practices : Should my mobile website be located at m.domain.com or domain.com/mobile?
-
I'd like to know if there's any difference between using m.domain.com/pages or domain.com/mobile/pages for a mobile website? Which one is better? Why? Does Google treat the two differently? As you can see, I'm new to this! This is my first time working on a mobile website, so any links/resources would be highly appreciated. Thanks!
-
As Collin already states: this is just part of the regular old discussion about 1) subdirectory, 2) subdomain or 3) different domain. So SEO wise you should think about that. But also, you should think about how your desktop version of the website related to the (tablet?) mobile version of the website. There's multiple approaches:
- Responsive design (all on the same domain, using the same URL's)
- Separate mobile website and desktop website
- Mobile website on subdomain (m.blaa.com)
- Mobile website on separate domain
In order to help you choose, see below:
Responsive design vs. mobile website
For regular websites using responsive design is a good solution. Except for the case in which the HTML and assets are quite large for a mobile device to load. In that case I always prefer to use a mobile version of the website on a subdomain.
I believe this is the best solution for high traffic websites which need to show quite some content per page.
-
I think it is better to use media queries and JavaScript on the same domain rather than using a subdomain. It makes efforts with SEO, site maintenance, content updates etc etc so much more efficient.
-
Even with proper rel=canonicals in place, there's still an issue of having multiple urls and having links and social signals go to two different urls with the same content rather than just one url.
I'd pick a single URL for all content. Mobile visitors should received optimized pages via responsive or adaptive design. I do it via user-agent detection, and I serve optimized versions to either desktops, tablets or phones using the 'same url'.
-
In short, they each have their own benefits
- m.domain.com lives in it's own world and is easier to make sweeping changes to and such
- domain.com/mobile leverages the existing strength of your domain
If you'd like to read more on it, here's an article that explains it a little more in depth... I won't bother just re-stating it all here.
http://plussearchmarketing.com/search/2012/03/mobile-urls-for-seo/
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
-
Does .me takes more time to rank than .com?
Hi, our company website is about freight forwarding, and im feared about .me extension they have taken. The location is for Dubai and the website is running google ads with a no-indexed landing page. I have the doubt, that our cargo company based website shipwaves.me is not receiving Google ads attention in that case. Besides, the other confusion is shipwaves.me takes time to rank for the keywords with high search or not other than .com extension. I'm confused why this company has taken, .me extension and anybody got the idea- is this .me is a top-level domain or it takes more time than .com domains.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LayaPaul0 -
Technical : Duplicate content and domain name change
Hi guys, So, this is a tricky one. My server team just made quite a big mistake :We are a big We are a big magento ecommerce website, selling well, with about 6000 products. And we are about to change our domaine name for administrative reasons. Let's call the current site : current.com and the future one : future.com Right, here is the issue Connecting to the search console, I saw future.com sending 11.000 links to current.com. At the same time DA was hit by 7 points. I realized future.com was uncorrectly redirected and showed a duplicated site or current.com. We corrected this, and future.com now shows a landing page until we make the domain name change. I was wondering what is the best way to avoid the penalty now and what can be the consequences when changing domain name. Should I set an alias on search console or something ? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kepass0 -
More pages is good for SEO? Is this true?
Hi Guys I have a question, I was told the more pages I have the better for SEO, Is this true?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
How to re-rank an established website with new content
I can't help but feel this is a somewhat untapped resource with a distinct lack of information.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChimplyWebGroup
There is a massive amount of information around on how to rank a new website, or techniques in order to increase SEO effectiveness, but to rank a whole new set of pages or indeed to 're-build' a site that may have suffered an algorithmic penalty is a harder nut to crack in terms of information and resources. To start I'll provide my situation; SuperTED is an entertainment directory SEO project.
It seems likely we may have suffered an algorithmic penalty at some point around Penguin 2.0 (May 22nd) as traffic dropped steadily since then, but wasn't too aggressive really. Then to coincide with the newest Panda 27 (According to Moz) in late September this year we decided it was time to re-assess tactics to keep in line with Google's guidelines over the two years. We've slowly built a natural link-profile over this time but it's likely thin content was also an issue. So beginning of September up to end of October we took these steps; Contacted webmasters (and unfortunately there was some 'paid' link-building before I arrived) to remove links 'Disavowed' the rest of the unnatural links that we couldn't have removed manually. Worked on pagespeed as per Google guidelines until we received high-scores in the majority of 'speed testing' tools (e.g WebPageTest) Redesigned the entire site with speed, simplicity and accessibility in mind. Htaccessed 'fancy' URLs to remove file extensions and simplify the link structure. Completely removed two or three pages that were quite clearly just trying to 'trick' Google. Think a large page of links that simply said 'Entertainers in London', 'Entertainers in Scotland', etc. 404'ed, asked for URL removal via WMT, thinking of 410'ing? Added new content and pages that seem to follow Google's guidelines as far as I can tell, e.g;
Main Category Page Sub-category Pages Started to build new links to our now 'content-driven' pages naturally by asking our members to link to us via their personal profiles. We offered a reward system internally for this so we've seen a fairly good turnout. Many other 'possible' ranking factors; such as adding Schema data, optimising for mobile devices as best we can, added a blog and began to blog original content, utilise and expand our social media reach, custom 404 pages, removed duplicate content, utilised Moz and much more. It's been a fairly exhaustive process but we were happy to do so to be within Google guidelines. Unfortunately, some of those link-wheel pages mentioned previously were the only pages driving organic traffic, so once we were rid of these traffic has dropped to not even 10% of what it was previously. Equally with the changes (htaccess) to the link structure and the creation of brand new pages, we've lost many of the pages that previously held Page Authority.
We've 301'ed those pages that have been 'replaced' with much better content and a different URL structure - http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/bands-musicians/wedding-bands to simply http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/wedding-bands, for example. Therefore, with the loss of the 'spammy' pages and the creation of brand new 'content-driven' pages, we've probably lost up to 75% of the old website, including those that were driving any traffic at all (even with potential thin-content algorithmic penalties). Because of the loss of entire pages, the changes of URLs and the rest discussed above, it's likely the site looks very new and probably very updated in a short period of time. What I need to work out is a campaign to drive traffic to the 'new' site.
We're naturally building links through our own customerbase, so they will likely be seen as quality, natural link-building.
Perhaps the sudden occurrence of a large amount of 404's and 'lost' pages are affecting us?
Perhaps we're yet to really be indexed properly, but it has been almost a month since most of the changes are made and we'd often be re-indexed 3 or 4 times a week previous to the changes.
Our events page is the only one without the new design left to update, could this be affecting us? It potentially may look like two sites in one.
Perhaps we need to wait until the next Google 'link' update to feel the benefits of our link audit.
Perhaps simply getting rid of many of the 'spammy' links has done us no favours - I should point out we've never been issued with a manual penalty. Was I perhaps too hasty in following the rules? Would appreciate some professional opinion or from anyone who may have experience with a similar process before. It does seem fairly odd that following guidelines and general white-hat SEO advice could cripple a domain, especially one with age (10 years+ the domain has been established) and relatively good domain authority within the industry. Many, many thanks in advance. Ryan.0 -
Is my SEO consultant doing blackhat tactic?
Hi, Can someone tell me what my SEO consultant is doing? I have engaged a SEO company in Singapore for my site: Http://www.rollerblinds.com.sg The thing is for the 1st 2 months, it is ranking well but for the next 4 months it is out of google. I noticed my links are on some strange article site. Is he doing blackhat tactic, I have been paying monthly for many months now with no result. Shall I continue to pay and how can I recover?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chanel270 -
What to do about all of the other domains we own?
So I had asked this question a while back in a previous thread and thought I had the correct answer to it, but just actually heard differently on a webinar by Dr. Pete. Basically, we have a large number of domains that just replicate our website. Some are brand names, some are exact match keyword domains, some are clever plays on words. This is a tactic that our marketing department thought was a good idea. Obviously its not. My question is - Some of these domains actually have a significant amount of link value coming into them. How people found them I'm not sure, but nonetheless, I want to try to take advantage of the incoming links somehow if possible. Dr. Pete recommended against 301 redirecting back to our main domain all at once because that would be a signal to Google that something fishy is going on. This is what I was going to do, but now I'm really not sure what to do now... If possible, it would be great to get Dr. Pete in this thread to get his comments. I wasn't able to get an answer on the SEO in 2012 Pro Webinar.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CodyWheeler0 -
DropBox.com High PA & DA?
"What’s up with these dl.dropbox.com High PA & DA links?" You know, It's frustrating to spend almost an entire day getting a few great link backs... then to find out your competitor has hundreds of cheap & easy link backs for the keyword you are going for with greater Authority [according to SEOmoz's OSE]. So I ran a search on one of our top competitors in Open Site Explorer to gather an idea of where the heck they are getting all of their links. Please feel free to copy my actions so you can see what I see. Run a search in OSE for www[dot]webstaurantstore[dot]com. Click on the ‘Anchor Text’ Tab. Click on the first Anchor Text Term, which should be ‘restaurant supplies’ :: Then it will expand, click on the ‘View more links and details in the inbound links section.’ As you scroll down the list you will notice that they have a bunch of linking pages from dl.dropbox.com, all of them are .pdb files, for their targeted Anchor Text, restaurant supplies. Q: So my question is can someone please elaborate on what .pdb files are and how they are getting this to work for them so well? Also you will notice, on the expanded Anchor Text Page, that their 6<sup>th</sup> most powerful link for this phrase (restaurant supplies) seems to be linked straight from a porn site, I thought Google does not rank adult sites like this? Q: For future reference, does anyone know legitimate websites to maybe file an SEO manipulation complaint? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Burkett.com0