Mobile Sitemap Best Practices w/ Responsive Design
-
I'm looking for insight into mobile sitemap best practices when building sites with responsive design. If a mobile site has the same urls as the desktop site the mobile sitemap would be very similar to the regular sitemap.
Is a mobile sitemap necessary for sites that utilize responsive design?
If so, is there a way to have a mobile sitemap that simply references the regular sitemap or is a new sitemap that has all urls tagged with the "" tag with each url required?
-
Google has a separate mobile crawler. This crawler probably uses guidelines from the mobile sitemap instead of the desktop sitemap.
I think it is worthwhile to make a separate mobile sitemap even with responsive design so Google knows those are the mobile as well as desktop pages.
-
I'm gonna say no. You don't need to make a separate mobile site map for a mobile design. Unless, you have different url's that are being called up by a mobile screen as apposed to a desktop screen. Depending on the size of the site, I would include those different domains as part of the same sitemap. The only times I would make a separate sitemap for a mobile site on a responsive design would be if I needed to see what pages were being indexed on my intended mobile URL's or if I had a huge amount of URL's and had to divide up the sitemap anyway.
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
-
Brightcove SEO Best Practices?
My company has decided to go with Brightcove as a video platform so we can better monetize all of the video content we create and better customize the experience as well. We have a pretty decent YouTube presence, and I won't let them stop using that because it would totally alienate us from part of our audience. So I was hoping someone could help me with the following: Are we able to keep videos hosted on YouTube as well as Brightcove without any risk of duplicate content? If we use the Brightcove player to embed videos in our on-site content, are we hindering potential organic search visibility? On the embeds, it's looking like it's using an iframe in our content (https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/sativa-indica-and-hybrid-whats-the-difference-between-cannabis-ty) - We're using a Brightcove WP plugin for the embed, but I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on a better way to implement/if this is even an issue at all. Are there any other general best practices/insights anyone has working with this platform? I found this article on their site, but I was wondering if there was anything else I should consider. Thank you in advance for any insights/answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidkaralisjr0 -
Client wants to remove mobile URLs from their sitemap to avoid indexing issues. However this will require SEVERAL billing hours. Is having both mobile/desktop URLs in a sitemap really that detrimental to search indexing?
We had an enterprise client ask to remove mobile URLs from their sitemaps. For their website both desktop & mobile URLs are combined into one sitemap. Their website has a mobile template (not a responsive website) and is configured properly via Google's "separate URL" guidelines. Our client is referencing a statement made from John Mueller that having both mobile & desktop sitemaps can be problematic for indexing. Here is the article https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-sitemaps-20137.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
We would be happy to remove the mobile URLs from their sitemap. However this will unfortunately take several billing hours for our development team to implement and QA. This will end up costing our client a great deal of money when the task is completed. Is it worth it to remove the mobile URLs from their main website to be in adherence to John Mueller's advice? We don't believe these extra mobile URLs are harming their search indexing. However we can't find any sources to explain otherwise. Any advice would be appreciated. Thx.0 -
What is the best SEO way for a shop
Hi there ! A client want to sell some products on its future website but just a small range (the most part of this website will not be an online shop). The idea is to add a "shop" button in the menu to redirect clients in this shop. I would like your opinion about how should I construct this shop, what do you think is the best for SEO : "www.website.com/shop" or "shop.website.com" thank you in advance for your answers !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnjinFrance0 -
Site re-design, full site domain A/B test, will we drop in rankings while leaking traffic
We are re-launching a client site that does very well in Google. The new site is on a www2 domain which we are going to send a controlled amount of traffic to, 10%, 25%, 50%, 75% to 100% over a 5 week period. This will lead to a reduction in traffic to the original domain. As I don't want to launch a competing domain the www2 site will not be indexed until 100% is reached. If Google sees the traffic numbers reducing over this period will we drop? This is the only part I am unsure of as the urls and site structure are the same apart from some new lower level pages which we will introduce in a controlled manner later? Any thoughts or experience of this type of re-launch would be much appreciated. Thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leshonk0 -
Broken sitemaps vs no sitemaps at all?
The site I am working on is enormous. We have 71 sitemap files, all linked to from a sitemap index file. The sitemaps are not up to par with "best practices" yet, and realistically it may be another month or so until we get them cleaned up. I'm wondering if, for the time being, we should just remove the sitemaps from Webmaster Tools altogether. They are currently "broken", and I know that sitemaps are not mandatory. Perhaps they're doing more harm than good at this point? According to Webmaster Tools, there are 8,398,082 "warnings" associated with the sitemap, many of which seem to be related to URLs being linked to that are blocked by robots.txt. I was thinking that I could remove them and then keep a close eye on the crawl errors/index status to see if anything changes. Is there any reason why I shouldn't remove these from Webmaster Tools until we get the sitemaps up to par with best practices?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edmundsseo0 -
We will be switching our shopping cart platform from volusion to magento and really cautious / nervous about our rankings / seo stuff. any advice for anyone that has migrated stores, etc. these urls are years old, etc.
shopping cart platform switch and SEO. What do you suggest? What's the best way to ensure we keep rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulDylan0 -
Domain Name Change - Best Practices?
Good day guys, We got a restaurant that is changing its name and domain. However they are keeping the same server location, same content and same pages (we are just changing the logo on the website). It just has to go a new domain. We don't want to lose the value of the current site, and we want to avoid any duplicate penalties. Could you please advise of the best practices of doing a domain name change? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael-Goode0 -
Mobile subdomain recommendations - Mobile SEO
My company is moving forward with creating a subdomain for mobile visitors (m.examplesite.com). I know there is much discussion on subdomain vs one url with different style sheets. That ship has sailed and the subdomain is the way we are proceeding. Google appears to recommend leaving both sites open to the normal Googlebot and redirecting the mobile bot to the mobile site (as we will be redirecting mobile visitors to the mobile subdomain). Has anyone had experience with this. Any duplicate content issues? Does anyone feel strongly that the normal Googlebot should be blocked from the mobile site (this seems to go against Google's recommendations)? It seems like another option is to use the canonical tag and let the search engines know the traditional site is the canonical page/version. Any recommendations? Any other issues that should be considered?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | btdavis0