Mobile site content and main site content
-
Help, pls! I have one main site and a mobile version of that site (m.domain.com). The main site has more pages, more content, different named urls. The main site has consistently done well in Google. The mobile site has not: the mobile site is buried.
I am working on adding more content to the mobile site, but am concerned about duplicate content. Could someone pls tell me the best way to deal with these two versions of our site? I can't use rel=canonical because the urls do not correspond to the same names on the main site, or can I? Does this mean I need to change the url names, offer different content (abridged), etc? I really am at a loss as to how to interpret Google's rules for this. Could someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? Any help or tips would GREATLY appreciated!!!!!
Thanks!
-
Hi Denise,
I would say you should treat a mobile user with the same content as a desktop one as they are there for the same reason- to access your site. Having said this you might find having just essential content for a user and a link to desktop for some of the other pages.
Obviously that's not helpful its down to preference. The way I would ask you to look at it is not from Google's point of view, but your users. What will give them the best experience?
If you want to rank the mobile site i would alter more content to be mobile optimized.
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks. I have seen this checklist in my research. My question is this, do I use the same amount of pages for a mobile version of my site and use the appropriate canonical redirects in order to be found? Right now, I have a small fraction of pages for our mobile site than our desktop site-the only pages with a canonical to alternate redirect are the home pages. I have read all the pages on the developer aspect of Google, used various checklists, but cannot for some reason, find a clear enough answer to go with. Could you or someone else help?
Thanks
-
Hi Denise,
you may find the recent Moz blog super helpful -
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your response. I did re-review this page and it looks like we need to expand our mobile site to include as many pages as our desktop site? Is this right? It used to be that mobile sites could have only a few pages and be fine... Any idea why now every mobile page url should correspond to an alternate desktop page url, or does it? That seems to be the only potential problem to me...
Thanks again!!!!
-
Hi Bill,
Thanks for your answer. I am wondering as per the guidelines in Google Developers on mobile sites if we should have a corresponding page on our m.website to our desktop version, and then show the alternate/canonical tags for each?
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details
Do I understand that correctly? Right now, we have about 15 pages for our mobile site and 78 pages on our main site...
Thanks for any feedback you can offer!
-
Hi Andy,
I know! This is my preference, and yet I get the feeling from our programming team that it would be too much work.. But thanks for the response and recommendation!!! Knowing little about coding, is there a simplified way to go from two separate sites to one responsive one that I could pass along to my programmer?
Thanks again!
-
Denise, I don't think you have too much to worry about when it comes to duplicate content. Google's crawler, Googlebot, has a mobile version and a desktop version: so you should be serving Googlebot's mobile version your mobile content and vice versa for the 'normal' desktop Googlebot.
That should generally take care of most of the duplicate content issues. I would, though, go ahead and take a look at this 2011 video from Matt Cutts and the link in the description that talks about mobile duplicate content issues.
-
Hello,
I did write a lovely response but the moz errors have killed that off so here is the shorter version :
Google is pretty cleaver at knowing a mobile site from a desktop version so i wouldn't worry too much but i recommend you take a good look in:
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/
you could also block the Google bot in your robots on your mobile site only allowing the mobile Google bot in (or visa versa)
Google bots - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943?hl=en
Hope that helps a bit.
-
Hi Denise,
Without looking at your site, I just wonder if a simpler solution would be to have someone fiddle with the CSS on your site and make it Responsive, rather than having a second site to contend with? You will retain your normal site rankings then and just have the site render differently depending upon the type of device.
This is the route I take with all of my clients, so if this isn't an option, then I am sorry but someone else will have to chip in.
-Andy
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
-
Value in Consolidating Similar Sites / Duplicate Content for Different URLs
We have 5 ecommerce sites: one company site with all products, and then four product-specific sites with relevant URL titles and products divided up between them (www.companysite.com, www.product1.com, www.product2.com, etc). We're thinking of consolidating the smaller sites into our most successful site (www.product1.com) in order to save management time and money, even though I hate to lose the product-specific URLs in search results. Is this a wise move? If we proceed, all of the products will be available on both our company site and our most successful site (www.company.com & www.product1.com). This would unfortunately give us two sites of duplicate content, since the products will have the same pictures, descriptions, etc. The only difference would be the URL. Would we face penalties from Google, even though it would make sense to continue to carry our products on our company site?
Technical SEO | | versare0 -
How different does content need to be to avoid a duplicate content penalty?
I'm implementing landing pages that are optimized for specific keywords. Some of them are substantially the same as another page (perhaps 10-15 words different). Are the landing pages likely to be identified by search engines as duplicate content? How different do two pages need to be to avoid the duplicate penalty?
Technical SEO | | WayneBlankenbeckler0 -
How to link site.com/blog or site.com/blog/
Hello friends, I have a very basic question but I can not find the right answer... I have made my blog linkbuilding using the adress "mysite.com/blog" but now im not sure if is better to do the linkbuilding to "mysite.com**/blog/ "** Is there any diference? Thanks...
Technical SEO | | lans27870 -
Googlebot cannot access your site
"At the end of July I received a message in my Google webmaster tools saying "Googlebot can't access your site" We checked our robots.txt file and removed a line break in it, and then I had Google Fetch the file again. I have not received any more messages since then. When we created the website I wrote all of the content and optimized each page for about 1 local keyword. A few weeks after I checked my keywords and did have a few on the first page of google. Since then almost all of them have completely disappeared. Because we had not link building effort I would not expect to still be on the first page, but I should definitely be seeing them before the 5th or even 10th page of Google. The address is http://www.tile-pompanobeach.com I'm not sure if these horrible results have something to do with the message from Google or something else. The problem is this client now wants to sign a contract with us for SEO and I really have no Idea what happened and if I will be able to figure it out. The main keyword for my home page is tile pompano beach and I aslo was using Pompano Beach Tile store for the About page which was previously on the first page of Google. Does anyone have some input?
Technical SEO | | DTOSI0 -
See your sites Architecture
Does anybody know a problem where you can see how your internal linkings look to the search engines?
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Redirecting a old aged site to a new exact match site?
Hi All, I have a question. I have 2 sites with me in the same sector and want some help. site 1 is a old site started back in 2003 and has some amount of links to it and has a pr 3 with some good links to it but doesn't rank much for any keywords for the timing. site 2 is a aged domain but newly developed with unique content and has a good amount of exact match with a .com version. so will there be any benefit by redirecting site 1 to site 2 to get the seo benefits and a start for link bulding? or is it best to develop and work on each site? the sector is health insurance. Thanks
Technical SEO | | macky71 -
Will 301 redirecting a site multiple times still preserve the original site value?
Hi, All! If site www.abc.com was already 301 redirected to site www.def.com, and now the site owner wants to redirect www.def.com to www.ghi.com - is there any concern that it's not going to work, and some of the original linkjuice, rank, trust, etc. is going to vanish? Or as long as the 301s are set up right, should you be able to 301 indefinitely? Does anyone have any experience with actually doing this and seeing good/bad/neutral results? Thanks in advance! -Aviva B
Technical SEO | | debi_zyx0 -
Can I noindex most of my site?
A large number of the pages on my site are pages that contain things like photos and maps that are useful to my visitors, but would make poor landing pages and have very little written content. My site is huge. Would it be benificial to noindex all of these?
Technical SEO | | mascotmike0