Mobile site ranking instead of/as well as desktop site in desktop SERPS
-
I have just noticed that the mobile version of my site is sometimes ranking in the desktop serps either instead of as well as the desktop site. It is not something that I have noticed in the past as it doesn't happen with the keywords that I track, which are highly competitive.
It is happening for results that include our brand name, e.g '[brand name][search term]'. The mobile site is served with mobile optimised content from another URL. e.g wwww.domain.com/productpage redirects to m.domain.com/productpage for mobile.
Sometimes I am only seen the mobile URL in the desktop SERPS, other times I am seeing both the desktop and mobile URL for the same product.
My understanding is that the mobile URL should not be ranking at all in desktop SERPS, could we be being penalised for either bad redirects or duplicate content?
Any ideas as to how I could further diagnose and solve the problem if you do believe that it could be harming rankings?
-
Hi Pugh,
Glad to hear it! Yes, you should also implement the tag on your homepages.
-
Hi Bridget,
Thanks for your response. Since asking the question I have implemented the advice that you offer.
Should there also be a rel=alternate and rel=canonical on the corresponding homepages?
-
Hi Pugh,
It sounds like you haven't implemented the rel=canonical tag for mobile. This tag works a bit like the hreflang tag, namely it prevents your mobile site from being viewed as duplicate content and should mean that your mobile URL is displayed in mobile SERPs and your desktop URL is displayed in desktop SERPs.
To implement (for more info see https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details
on the desktop page, add:
and on the **corresponding **mobile page, the required annotation should be:
This rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required.
Make sure you are referencing the corresponding URLs (so www.example.com/xyz and m.example.com/xyz, rather than simply referencing the mobile homepage).
Hope that helps!
-
Yea it's not that easy to just implement a responsive design unfortunately otherwise I would. That is the long term goal but not a realistic option at the moment, so in the meantime I need to solve the problem described.
-
Hello, I agree with Lesley here. Google stated recently that: “Google recommends webmasters follow the industry best practice of using responsive web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices.“
take a minute from your time and read this article, am sure you will find it useful http://www.atladasmedia.co.uk/blog/why-google-loves-responsive-design/
-
Hi
My suggestion to you is to have one website which is Responsive (http://mashable.com/2012/12/11/responsive-web-design/)
This would prevent your traffic from being diluted to a mobi and desktop site but rather serve uses with one website that is optimised for all. This goes hand in hand with the user experience. UX and SEO works together.
Create a responsive desktop site and redirect the mobi site to it.
Hope this 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
-
Mobile first - what about content that you don't want to display on mobile?
ANOTHER mobile first question. Have searched the forum and didn't see something similar. Feel free to passive- aggressively link to an old thread. TL;DR - Some content would just clutter the page on mobile but is worth having on desktop. Will this now be ignored on desktop searches? Long form: We have a few ecommerce websites. We're toying with the idea of placing a lot more text on our collection/category pages. Primarily to try and set the scene for our products and sell the company a bit more effectively. It's also, obviously, an opportunity to include a couple of long tail keywords. Because mobile screens are small (duh) and easily cluttered, we're inclined _not _to display this content on mobile. In this case; will any SEO benefit be lost entirely, even to searchers on desktop? Sorry if I've completely misunderstood mobile-first indexing! Just an in-house marketing manager trying to keep up! cries into keyboard Thanks for your time.
Technical SEO | | MSGroup
Ross0 -
Hey all -- ever seen a client with URLs that keep repeating the domain? Something like: client.com/client.com/client.com/subfolder-name. Any idea what glitch could cause that?
Hey all -- ever seen a client with URLs that keep repeating the domain? Something like: client.com/client.com/client.com/subfolder-name. Any idea what glitch could cause that?
Technical SEO | | TDC_SEO0 -
Sudden traffic down after mobile site
Hi to all. I have a huge problem about my web site traffic. We published our mobile site version under mobile domain in m.etilercerrental.com. And we published mobile site sitemap under main site such as sitemap-mobile.xml and notify google from webmaster tools. After a while whole site traffic gone down so badly. Almost 60% gone down which doesnt make sense. Mobile sitemap is hosted under desktop site. And we didnt add any link to switch sites between mobile and desktop version. We automaticly redirect between desktop and mobile versiyons by detecting useragent. One another this is we have announcement section in dekstop version but we dont have it in mobile. But we are not making any redirection to mobile site when user visits the announcement section even by mobile phone. Because we are not displaying it in mobile version.
Technical SEO | | gkhnrtk
One last this is we are making redirections automatically and not asking user preference such as showing a link in the bottom of page to switch sites betwenn mobile and pc version. While developing mobile site we followed instructions in this https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/?hl=tr For find the details I would like to give you some site urls. Site Url : http://www.etilercarrental.com/
Sitemap Xml : http://www.etilercarrental.com/sitemap.xml
Mobile Sitemap Xml : http://www.etilercarrental.com/sitemap-mobile.xml0 -
Redirect of https:// to http:// without SSL. Possible or not?!
Good afternoon, smart dudes : ) I am here to ask for your help. I posted this question on google help forum and stackoverflow, but looks like people do not know the correct answer... QUESTION: We used to have a secured site, but recently purchased a separate reservation software that provides SSL (takes clients to a separate secured website) where they can fill out the reservation form. We cancelled our SSL (just think its a waste to pay $100 for securing plain text). Now i have so many links pointing to our secured site and i have no idea how to fix it! How do i redirect https://www.mysite.comto http://www.mysite.com.Also would like to mention that i already have redirect from non www to www domain (not sure if that matters): RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$ [NC]RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]As i already mentioned....we do not have SSL!!!! None of those 301 redirect codes i found online work (you have to have SSL for the site to be redirected from https to http | currently i get an error - can't establish a secured connection to the server ). Is there anything i can do???? Or do i have to purchase SSL again?
Technical SEO | | JennaD140 -
Mobile site is not ranking in the mobile search results
I posted last month about problems with a mobile site, which is served from a separate URL (m.mydomain.com) as currently responsive design is not an option. The problem was that the mobile site was being returned in the desktop index along with the desktop site, and the desktop site was being returned in the mobile index instead of the mobile site. I have therefore implemented rel=canonical and rel=alternate as is advised by Google, but this has stopped the desktop site from appearing in the mobile index, but hasn't caused the mobile site to rank instead. What should I do now? One idea I have is to remove the rel=canonical and rel=alternate links so that the desktop site ranks in the mobile index again. There is a redirect in place anyway so when people click on a desktop link from a mobile search, they will still be redirected to the mobile equivalent. I could then set the m.mydomain.com to noindex to stop it from being returned in the desktop results and potentially causing duplicate content issues? What do you think about this as a work around?
Technical SEO | | pugh0 -
How to redirect my .com/blog to my server folder /blog ?
Hello SEO Moz ! Always hard to post something serious for the 04.01 but anyway let's try ! I'm releasing Joomla websites website.com, website.com/fr, website.com/es and so on. Usually i have the following folders on my server [ROOT]/com [ROOT]/com/fr [ROOT]/com/es However I would like to get the following now (for back up and security purpose). [ROOT]/com [ROOT]/es [ROOT]/fr So now what can I do (I gues .htaccess) to open the folder [ROOT]/es when people clic on website.com/es ? It sounds stupid but I really don't know. I found this on internet but did not answer my needs. .htaccess RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | AymanH
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(^/fr/.) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ /sites/fr/$1 [L,R=301] Tks a lot ! Florian0 -
Mobile Site Domain/URL Structure
We are currently building a mobile optimised version of our main website and I had some questions with regard to SEO. 1. Is it best to structure the domain as: m.yourdomain.com yourdomain/m 2. It is correct to place rel="cannonical" on the mobile pages and to have only the main site indexed? Thanks in advance and links or books on mobile seo you can direct me to that would be greatly appreciated. Phil
Technical SEO | | Phily0 -
Exclude mobile pages from non mobile Google serps
Hi Everybody I see that a lot of our pages on our mobile shop has started to turn up when i do site:domainname.com on google. As they could potentially compete with the similar non mobile version of the same page, is there some way to exlude the mobile domain in non mobile google result without blocking the mobile version altogether. We use an m.domain.com version for our mobile site.
Technical SEO | | AndersDK0