How to handle mobile site with less pages than the main site?

[theLotter]

We are developing a mobile version of our website that will utilize responsive design/dynamic serving.

About 70% of the main website will be included in the mobile version.  What (if anything) should be the redirect for pages not included in the mobile version of the site?

Also - for one specific section users will be redirected from that page to the homepage, what is the redirect that should be used for this?

Thanks!

[Aleyda]

Hi there!

You shared that you're using responsive along with dynamic serving (can you please specify more?), since for any of those two approaches you will be providing the same URLs for both mobile and desktop users and crawlers, you won't need to redirect:

• With responsive: You use CSS Media Queries and the same HTMLs for both mobile and desktop purposes. Your design will be fluid and always "fit" the visitors device, you won't need to serve different HTMLs nor redirect.
• With dynamic serving: You serve different HTMLs based on the user agent (mobile or desktop) through the same URLs. Since the different HTMLs will be shown through the same URLs no redirect is needed neither. What you need to make sure to effectively implement user agent detection (avoiding the errors specified by Google here), using the vary HTTP header, as explained here.

On the other hand, the mobile Web approach that does need redirects is when you set a parallel mobile Website, for which you will enable a mobile targeted Web version through their specific URLs (it's recommended to show them in an "m" subdomain, following a clean and optimized URL naming system that can easily refer to the desktop one), for example:

• Category A for Desktop version: www.yourbrand.com/category-a/
• Category A for Mobile version: m.yourbrand.com/category-a/

For this last setting you do need redirects, along with the usage of rel="alternate" tag pointing to the corresponding mobile URL from their desktop URL version and a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the corresponding desktop URL from their mobile URL version, in a page to page basis, as described here.

If at some point you have a desktop URL that doesn't have a mobile version (or viceversa, a mobile URL that doesn't have a desktop version) then you shouldn't really do anything "extra" really, since:

• If for some reason a user can end-up visiting for a URL targeting another device and you don't have it, then it's better to leave the users browsing through the other Web version, since you don't really have that content still optimized for them and although not optimized from a user experience perspective, this is better than implement "non-relevant redirects" that would "force" these users to go to other URLs that although will be optimized for Mobile, won't provide the content that they're looking to consume.
• If you correctly configure your mobile and desktop versions tagging they shouldn't rank in the search results that they're not targeting to so the previous situation really would happen mostly if someone directly shares a specific Mobile URL to Desktop users and you don't have that Desktop version for that URL, for example, or viceversa.

So to avoid this type of situation directly the best is to have always a mobile version of your desktop URLs and viceversa, although as you can see, if this is not possible, the alternative scenario (to leave it as it is) is not really negative and shouldn't affect a high amount of your users.

If you have any question or additional doubt, please let me know!

Thanks,

Aleyda

[SEOAndy]

2 things - if you are sniffing a browser agent you can sniff and redirect

the other is that if you are designing a responsive website then you shouldn't need to change the content on the site to make it effective on mobiles. I do understand in some cases it can't be avoided but where that is a case you should forward to a subdomain making it easy to deal with redirects