What's the best way to redirect mobile site?
-
Hi,
We have a mobile website using a sub-directory domain.com/m/whatever-page/. Our mobile is completely separate site from desktop version.
What's the best way to handle the redirection from mobile visitors and those that are searching from mobile and see desktop version in the search result?
Appreciate anyone's expert advise.
Thanks,
Willy -
I've responded to specific comments below, but here's the information you need to redirect: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details
The gist is, you need:
- 301 or 302 redirects from the desktop site to the mobile site, based on user agent detection
- Rel="canonical" tag on each mobile page pointing to to each desktop page
- Rel="alternate" tag on each desktop page pointing to each mobile page
- A Vary HTTP header
- A mobile sitemap
As I mentioned below, I also recommend that you have a link at the bottom of the mobile and desktop sites pointing to the other version. That way, if you get the redirects wrong, people can self correct.
-
I disagree with Lesley, saying that you should just ask. I would recommend that you redirect to the mobile version of the the site, then ask. Basically: get people onto the page that you're 90% sure they want to be on, but let them switch back and forth. Just add a link to the footer of the deskop and mobile sites letting people switch between the two.
He's correct about redirecting to the right page, though. Don't redirect all of your desktop pages to the mobile homepage. When Google ranks your desktop pages on mobile search results, it checks out the redirect to mobile content. If the mobile content isn't similar, the page won't rank in mobile.
-
The best way to handle redirects is to use a 301 or 302 redirect (this is probably the only time in SEO that either gives the same result) based on user agent detection.
Is that enough detail?
-
Just to add to our original question. It seems pretty clear that device detection is accomplished by user agent detection. Under our original plan to redirect visitors on mobiles to a new URL which carries the mobile version of the page, how should that redirection be accomplished in a search engine compatible fashion? What type of redirection should be used?
I suspect we'll need to continue with our plan to redirect to a different URL for now, but am concerned that this needs to happen in a way which won't harm our SEO.
many thanks in advance for any help with this ....
-
Thanks Leslie, interesting and useful considerations.
-
The best way is to ask. With the ever changing landscape of devices, automatically redirecting is falling out of favor. I would use a cookied little bar at the bottom of the page that asks if they want to view the mobile site. Let them select or close it and have it expire after the session.
One thing to keep in mind, google wants you to redirect to the same mobile page. Like if a user is on site.com/products/nifty-hair-gizmo.html don't redirect them to m.site.com, redirect them to m.site.com/products/nifty-hair-gizmo.html
The reason that automatically redirecting is falling out is because of devices like the new chrome cast and how other phones are set up. I might browse to your site on my phone and be casting it to my 46" lcd and you would never know. But I am going to be irritated if I have to look at your site in a mobile version on my tv.
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
-
Google smacked my site and dropped all rankings, can't find out why
I have checked out everything, I mean everything. We have no dupe content, our content is a little thin, but it is ours and accurate enough to help our customers.We follow all SEO guidelines and make sure we de-index any pages with no / little content (like privacy, or faq) All in all, we haven't done any major updates to the sites, and everything was great (page one on almost all kw) but beginning of the month, all kw wiped to the second page, than third, than back to one and now pretty much gone (rank 100-200) I really don't know what to do. We didn't receive a manual action, and the last algo update was nothing big to cause such a drastic change. Meanwhile our competition (multiple sites) are gaining in ranks and nothing happened to them (most of them have even less content and not even SSL) Negative SEO is out of question, I check all links via ahrefs every other day. Any help is appreciated Thanks
Search Behavior | | s-s0 -
What to do with Redirects
I need some advise. I am remapping the eCommerce Categories to achieve a few goals: Have better landing pages - for a better user experience. I've been a bad boy - some crappy links. Panda did hurt. I've added layered navigation and faceted search. In order to achieve a better user experience I've had a to break up the old categories. For example, when you landed on these pages - you had to choose between different sets of gender and medal type. Model Name Mens Gold Mens Stainless Ladies Two Tone Mid-Size Yellow Gold Do you see? So - here is what I am doing.. I created a better menu to be a lot more specific for people who land on other pages to get there. Now they can goto mens model name and select stainless or whatever, if they want, to dig in there or use the layered navigation. What we also did is now you can even view 20 products on these pages too as well as see the layered navigation to filter. Now this is my question - I'm creating a list of these old categories and my plan is to 302 them to the search page with the faceted search. I have my search page globally, noindex, nofollow - is this the best strategy? How would you do it? Apart from Redirects - what have you , other SEOs, learned about layered navigation and faceted search - where can it cause issues for SEO?
Search Behavior | | joseph.chambers0 -
Is putting/removing Adsense ads on the site affects crawling for seo?
Because I noticed when we totally remove Adsense ads on our site, the pages crawled per day on the google webmastertools suddenly dropped into noticable amount and we tested again to turn it on for a singe day, it jumped up again. So if Adsense affects crawling then, if we have adsense ad on all pages of the site the more chances it gets crawled by the bot? WS76R8w
Search Behavior | | CruiseControl0 -
Blog posts not getting indexed and being outranked by scrapper sites.
Our Google traffic has dropped significantly over the last year and now we're struggling to even get our blog posts indexed. It's been extremely discouraging and we're trying to do what ever we can to fix it. I've included a screenshot of our Google traffic as well as Pages Indexed according to WebmasterTools. http://i.imgur.com/Wu1D8.jpg The Problem Our blog posts are frequently not getting indexed. Many times they are outranked by low authority scraper sites, our Twitter/FB account, etc. Sometimes our homepage will rank instead of the blog post. Sometimes we'll break a news story, get tons of quality backlinks, and still be nowhere in Google. Pretty much the only Google traffic we see is from existing posts. Still 3,200 pages indexed when we have only 1,600 posts. I guess this isn't really a problem... just waiting for the meta noindex to take effect. More details We've seen no duplicate content or other warnings from WebmasterTools. We've been constantly acquiring quality backlinks from credible sites. We deleted the useless content and fixed the canonical issues that were a result of switching servers. History Our site is a news/entertainment blog. The traffic usually has spikes depending on what's going on in the news. Nov 1, 2011 - Site kept maxing out at 30k+ visits so we switched servers. Jan 30, 2012 - Hired a writer so we could focus on other aspects of the site. Apr 19, 2012 - Noticed our posts weren't getting indexed like they used to. Suspected our writer was spinning articles but couldn't find any evidence. 90% of our blog posts were nowhere to be found in Google. Scrapper sites would outrank us for our own stories... even our Twitter account was ranking ahead of us. IF our story would show up in Google it would usually be the home page instead of the blog post. Sep 2012 - Finally got more serious about addressing the problem. Noticed a couple potentially big problems and started making changes. Canonical Issues non-www site didn't redirect to www. It showed 2 different link profiles according to OpenSiteExplorer and 0 backlinks according to Webmaster Tools. Wordpress shortlinks weren't redirecting to the actual permalink. For instance http://www.domain.com/?p=123 and http://www.domain.com/post-example were both getting indexed. For every post there were 4 different versions that Google had to choose from. http://domain.com/?p=123, http://www.domain.com/?p=123, http://domain.com/post-example, and http://www.domain.com/post-example I figured the canonical issues must have happened when we switched servers which was the reason for the drop in WebmasterTools indexed pages and increase in Not Selected pages. FIXED (Sep 15): One we fixed the canonical issue the Indexed Pages went back up however the Not Selected is still the same. Duplicate Content When we first created our site we wanted to have tons of images for each musician/athlete/actor/etc. so we uploaded about 5-10 for each person. We created a blog post for each image with no writing and the exact same post titles. As a result there were TONS of low-quality, similar posts, with virtually identical permalinks. e.g. http://www.domain.com/james-smith1, http://www.domain.com/james-smith2, http://www.domain.com/james-smith3, etc. A crawl on Sep 26 showed over 550 duplicate content warnings. FIXED (Oct 1): We deleted/301 redirected the useless pages (they weren't getting traffic anyways) and by the next crawl the number was almost to 0... which it's at now. We also had TONS of tags (since there're constantly new names in the media) that were getting indexed so we had meta robots noindex them. Questions: Why aren't a majority of our posts getting indexed? Were we penalized or just stuck because of a filter? How long should it take for meta robots to noindex the tags pages? (I did it on Sep 25 but they are still there) If a site is scraping our content (same title, image, excert) but linking to us, should we contact them and tell them to remove it? Is there anything else we need to do start getting our blog posts indexed like they used to? Should we try contacting Google to re-evaluate our site? Sorry, that was a LOT of writing. If anyone wants the URL please let me know so I can PM it to you. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Wu1D8.jpg
Search Behavior | | gfreeman230 -
Best way to remove worthless/thin content?
I have a Wordpress site with about 3,000 pages and 1,000 of those are no value/duplicate content and drive no traffic. They are blog posts each with a single image and permalinks like example.com/post1, example.com/post2 etc. I've started by deleting pages and 301 redirecting to relevant pages that actually have content. Is deleting and 301 redirecting the best route? Is 1,000 to many 301 redirects? Should I just delete the pages that aren't really relevant to anything else? Anything else I should know about deleting all of these pages? Any help would be great!
Search Behavior | | gfreeman230 -
Buying expired domains with PR and redirecting question :)
Hi, Might be a silly question but wanted to ask it anyway. Lets say I run a gifts website and this year I decide I want to try for a more competitive keyword 'Christmas Gifts'. Now each year I see a lot of search on for example 'Christmas Gifts 2011' and because of the search volume the EMD for this is gone (an affiliate has brought it or something). So the affiliate works hard on ranking it builds up say PR2-PR3 but when it comes around to renewing the domain they don't bother because 2011 search volume has passed and they move onto 'Christmas Gifts 2012'. My question is this: If I was to buy the 'Christmas Gifts 2011' when it expires and redirect it to my Xmas page would it pass the PR and give my new page a boost?
Search Behavior | | activitysuper0 -
Drastic Fluctuation in Site Rankings
All, Hope you are having a good day! Recently I had a strange issue with one of my site and I am not sure what might have caused it. I am sure this would be a good place to discuss about it and get some feedback from the elite people in the industry. Here is the problem. Last weekend (On sunday noon) my site which was ranking on Page 1 suddenly dropped its ranking for its main keywords to nowhere, I was panicked to see what was happening and by the end of the day it was slowly coming back and by next morning everything was back. Again on Wednesday noon, the same thing happened. However, this time it din't come up by the next morning. Making it worse, all of my keyword rankings went down from good spots to no where and there was a point when I could no longer see my site. I was worried something might have happened this time and was not sure what could the reason be. On Friday afternoon all the ranking came up better than the previous (which is a very good news for me). At the moment, my site is doing very well and I am really happy about it. I did realize that Google was updating their Algorithm, but this behavior is the strangest I have seen over years. Can someone enlighten me on this peculiar behavior. Is there something wrong with my site or is it a common thing that I have never noticed? I have never done anything blackhat for the site. To be honest, all I have done is some low level link building on the site and the site had some advantage of a re-direct from one my previous site which was doing very well in search engines (I changed it to take advantage of the new domain I had). Your opinions/suggestions are a appreciated.
Search Behavior | | frostmill0 -
Is there way to pull a report by date a backlink was aquired?
I'm trying to figure out if the lift in our traffic has anything to do with a new backlink. Is there a way to get an alert anytime a new site links back to us our pull a backlink report by date.
Search Behavior | | M.Seals0