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
-
Merger & Acquisition Best Practices
Our company (DA 40) recently acquired another company (DA 20). The domain for the acquired company is up, and I am being asked if we should keep paying for the domain. I have a couple of questions regarding this. Is it best practice to continue paying for the older domain and do 301 redirects to our website? If yes, do I have to add 301 redirects for individual matching pages? For example, if the old site has the topic XYZ, should a 301 go to our site if we have a similar page topic XYZ? What about contact pages, about us, etc? Do we redirect all non-matching topics to the new home page? Or in the case of their blogs, do we redirect their blogs to the new blog home page even though we are not keeping their old blogs? What if our company keeps acquiring other companies, are we to assume we have to keep paying for the domains of the acquired companies? Is there anyone out there that would say stop paying for the old domain and just review the company's inbound links, reach out to those sites, and make sure they link to the new site instead? Thanks for the help in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CharityHBS0 -
Redirect wordpress from /%post_id%/%postname%/ to /blog/%postname%/
Hi what is the code to redirect wordpress blog from site.com/%post_id%/%postname%/ to site.com/blog/%postname%/ We are moving the site to a new server and new url structure. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Keyword Targeting / Cannibalisation
Hi Guys We're about to launch a very large website for a flooring company and would like to find out more about _key word _cannibalisation - to put my mind at rest. I know Rand posted a Whiteboard Friday early last year about this topic and mentioned using part of the same keyword was ok to use. All our keywords are specifically geared for "user intent" meaning each keyword has relevance and the content to back up the keyword. We've ensured the keywords are located within each url, placed at the start of the page title, h1 etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GaryVictory1 -
Duplicate Content www vs. non-www and best practices
I have a customer who had prior help on his website and I noticed a 301 redirect in his .htaccess Rule for duplicate content removal : www.domain.com vs domain.com RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnvoyWeb
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com/$1 [R=301,L,NC] The result of this rule is that i type MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com in the browser and it redirects to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com I wonder if this is causing issues in SERPS. If I have some inbound links pointing to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some pointing to MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, I would think that this rewrite isn't necessary as it would seem that Googlebot is smart enough to know that these aren't two sites. -----Can you comment on whether this is a best practice for all domains?
-----I've run a report for backlinks. If my thought is true that there are some pointing to www.www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some to the www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, is there any value in addressing this?0 -
Best practice to disavow spammy links
Hi Forum, I'm trying to quantify the logic for removing spammy links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
I've read the article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-check-which-links-can-harm-your-sites-rankings. Based on my pivot chart results, I see around 55% of my backlinks at zero pagerank. Q: Should I simply remove all zero page rank links or carry out an assessment based on the links (zero pagerank) DA / PA. If so what are sensible DA and/or PA metrics? Q: What other factors should be taken into consideration, such as anchor text etc.0 -
Canonical URLs and Sitemaps
We are using canonical link tags for product pages in a scenario where the URLs on the site contain category names, and the canonical URL points to a URL which does not contain the category names. So, the product page on the site is like www.example.com/clothes/skirts/skater-skirt-12345, and also like www.example.com/sale/clearance/skater-skirt-12345 in another category. And on both of these pages, the canonical link tag references a 3rd URL like www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. This 3rd URL, used in the canonical link tag is a valid page, and displays the same content as the other two versions, but there are no actual links to this generic version anywhere on the site (nor external). Questions: 1. Does the generic URL referenced in the canonical link also need to be included as on-page links somewhere in the crawled navigation of the site, or is it okay to be just a valid URL not linked anywhere except for the canonical tags? 2. In our sitemap, is it okay to reference the non-canonical URLs, or does the sitemap have to reference only the canonical URL? In our case, the sitemap points to yet a 3rd variation of the URL, like www.example.com/product.jsp?productID=12345. This page retrieves the same content as the others, and includes a canonical link tag back to www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. Is this a valid approach, or should we revise the sitemap to point to either the category-specific links or the canonical links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 379seo0 -
How should i best structure my internal links?
I am new to SEO and looking to employ a logical but effective internal link strategy. Any easy ways to keep track of what page links to what page? I am a little confused regarding anchor text in as much as how I should use this. e.g. for a category page "Towels", I was going to link this to another page we want to build PA for such as "Bath Sheets". What should I put in for anchor text? keep it simple and just put "Bath Sheets" or make it more direct like "Buy Bath Sheets". Should I also vary anchor text if i have another 10 pages internally linking to this or keep it the same. Any advise would be really helpful. Thanks Craig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Launching a new site with old, new and updated content: What’s best practice?
Hi all, We are launching a new site soon and I’d like your opinion on best practice related to its content. We will be retaining some pages and content (although the URLs might change a bit as I intend to replace under-scores with hyphens and remove .asp from some extensions in order to standardise a currently uneven URL structuring). I will also be adding a lot of new pages with new content, along with amend some pages and their content (and amend URLs again if need be), and a few pages are going to be done away with all together. Any advice from those who’ve done the same in the past as to how best to proceed? Does the URL rewriting sound OK to do in conjunction with adding and amending content? Cheers, Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0