Mobile or Responsive canonical question?
-
Hi guys
We are in the process of expanding and are moving our site to magento enterprise. Today we met with a company pitching a seperate mobile site. While Im al for a mobile site in terms of look and user experience, from an seo point i dont believe and "m." domain is the best idea.
However if we were to go with a mobile site, would adding canonical tags to the mobile urls pointing to the desktop urls be useful?
For example m.trespass.co.uk/category-page has the canonical tag pointing to trespass.co.uk/category-page
Im looking for someone who has direct experience wth this situation for one of their clients.
Thanks
Robert
-
Hi Robert,
In my experience, going for responsive design is always the best option. m. sites can work but they don't make sense is responsive is an option.
Take a look here in regards to your canonical query: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details
Let me know if that helps!
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
-
Rel Canonicals not working properly.
We recently implemented rel=canonicals on a few of our pages to prevent query parameters from showing up in the SERPs. The two pages we added the tags to are no longer ranking. The pages used to rank very well for branded terms such as "morningstar direct" and "morningstar sustainability", but now don't show up at all. When you search for the urls specifically, for example "products/direct morningstar" the query parameter is still indexing. Does anyone know why this might be or what we can do to fix this issue? The two pages are www.morningstar.com/products/direct and https://www.morningstar.com/company/sustainability
Technical SEO | | jmigdal0 -
Duplicate Content Question
I have a client that operates a local service-based business. They are thinking of expanding that business to another geographic area (a drive several hours away in an affluent summer vacation area). The name of the existing business contains the name of the city, so it would not be well-suited to market 'City X' business in 'City Y'. My initial thought was to (for the most part) 'duplicate' the existing site onto a new site (brand new root domain). Much of the content would be the exact same. We could re-word some things so there aren't entire lengthy paragraphs of identical info, but it seems pointless to completely reinvent the wheel. We'll get as creative as possible, but certain things just wouldn't change. This seems like the most pragmatic thing to do given their goals, but I'm worried about duplicate content. It doesn't feel as though this is spammy though, so I'm not sure if there's cause for concern.
Technical SEO | | stevefidelity0 -
Canonical Advice - ?
Hi everyone, I have a bit of problem with duplicate content on a newly launched site and looking for some advice on which pages to canonicalize. Our legacy site had product "information" pages that now 301 to new product information pages. The reason for the legacy having these pages (instead of pages where you can purchase) is because we used our vendors "cart link", which was an iframe inside the website. So in order to get ranked for these products, we created these pages, that had links to the frame where they could buy. The strategy worked, and we got ranked for our products. Now with the new site, we have those same product information pages, but when you click the link to buy, it goes to a page which now is on our actual site, where you can make the purchase, but this page contains the same basic information, though it looks very different. So my question --- the product "information" pages, are the new 301 homes and are the pages with the rank. The purchase pages are new and have no rank, but are essentially duplicate content. Should I put the canonical link element on the purchase page and tell Google to regard the information pages since those are ranked? It just seems weird to me to direct Google away from the place where people can purchase, however, the purchase pages aren't nearly as "pretty" as the information pages are, and wouldn't be the greatest landing pages. We have an automotive site, and the purchase page you have to enter vehicle information. The information page is nicer, and if the visitor is interested, its just one click to get to that page to buy. What to do here? I am fairly new to Moz, and I couldn't determine whether I am permitted to include an example link from our site of what I am referring to. Is that permitted? Thanks for any help anyone can provide.
Technical SEO | | yogitrout1
Kristin0 -
X-cart page crawling question.
I have an x-cart site and it is showing only 1 page being crawled. I'm a newbie, is this common? Can it be changed? If so, how? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SteveLMCG0 -
Want to Target Mobile site for Google Mobile Version and Desktop Site for Google Desktop Version
I have ecommerce site with both mobile version and desktop version. Mobile version starts with m.example.com and full version starts with www.example.com I am using same content through out both site and using 301 redirection by detecting user agent vice-versa. My both sites are accessible to crawl by any google spider. I have submitted both sites's sitemap to GWT and mobile site having mobile sitemap xml, so google can easily recognize my mobile site. Is it going to help to rank my both sites as per my expectation? I need to rank for mobile site in Google mobile and ranking for desktop site in Google desktop version. Some of pages of my mobile site are started to appearing in Google desktop version. So how I can stop them to appear in Google desktop? Your comments are highly welcome.
Technical SEO | | Hexpress0 -
Domain Crawl Question
We have our domain hosted by two providers - web.com for the root and godaddy for the subdomain. Why SEOMOZ is not picking up the total pages of the entire domain?
Technical SEO | | AppleCapitalGroup0 -
Complex duplicate content question
We run a network of three local web sites covering three places in close proximity. Each sitehas a lot of unique content (mainly news) but there is a business directory that is shared across all three sites. My plan is that the search engines only index the business in the directory that are actually located in the place the each site is focused on. i.e. Listing pages for business in Alderley Edge are only indexed on alderleyedge.com and businesses in Prestbury only get indexed on prestbury.com - but all business have a listing page on each site. What would be the most effective way to do this? I have been using rel canonical but Google does not always seem to honour this. Will using meta noindex tags where appropriate be the way to go? or would be changing the urls structure to have the place name in and using robots.txt be a better option. As an aside my current url structure is along the lines of: http://dev.alderleyedge.com/directory/listing/138/the-grill-on-the-edge Would changing this have any SEO benefit? Thanks Martin
Technical SEO | | mreeves0 -
Weird Indexing Question
Google has indexed mysite.com/ and mysitem.com/\/ (no idea why). If you click on the /%5C? URL it takes you to mysite.com//. I have a rel=canonical tag on it that goes to mysite.com/ but I was wondering if there was another way to correct the issue.
Technical SEO | | BryanPhelps-BigLeapWeb0
