Mobile site not getting indexed
-
My site is www.findyogi.com - a shopping comparison site
The mobile site is hosted at m.findyogi.com
I fixed my sitemap and attribution to mobile site in May last week. My mobile site pages are getting de-indexed since then.
Website - www.findyogi.com/mobiles/motorola/motorola-moto-g-16gb-b95ef8/price - indexed
Mobile - m.findyogi.com/mobiles/motorola/motorola-moto-g-16gb-b95ef8/price - _not indexed. _
Google is crawling my website and mobile site normally.
What am I am doing wrong?
-
Thanks Tom. This answers it.
-
Hi,
Both versions of the URL aren’t appearing in search results but both are accessible from the same URL, depending on which device you attempt to access the site with. But when you search for a page on your site on a mobile phone and hit the link to the page you’re requesting, then you're directed toward the mobile page thanks to your redirect, even though you aren’t hitting a link to the mobile subdomain.
If you wanted to remove the canonical tags from all your pages that would see your mobile pages indexed in SERPs, but you’d be causing yourself a duplicate content issue and forcing both those pages to compete with one another for the same keyword(s).
So when you search for a page on your site in Google after removing the canonical tag, you’d see the full site URL and then the mobile URL, giving the user the choice to click either. When they click to go to the full site they’ll still be redirected to your mobile page.
I can understand your concern that your mobile site isn’t getting indexed and therefore will not be found in Google but you’re misunderstanding the point - these pages are essentially 2 versions of the same page, containing the same content and different styles. Rather than forcing mobile and main site to compete with each other, you can have the best of both worlds with your current (correct) implementation of the canonical tag.
Thanks,
Tom
-
Thanks Tom.
It does answer the reason. What I fail to understand is, shouldn't Google show the mobile site on mobile search? Shouldn't canonical be device dependent?
-
Hi there,
I’ve taken a quick look at your site, and the reason these pages are not getting indexed is because of the rel=canonical link element in your which indicates to google which version of the page you’d like to be indexed. Note this is just a guideline to Google, but since you’re using it properly they are only indexing the none mobile version of your site.
I can see that you’ve got a redirect in place to send mobile traffic to the mobile page, and there is no need to have both versions of a single page being indexed, and therefore competing against each other in SERPs. As these pages are next to identical in content, googlebot is seeing your rel=canonical and attributing all the SEO juice to your original page.
When someone searches for one of your products they see the result for your desktop page as only one result, not 2 results competing against each other. The user then clicks on the link and is directed toward the mobile site if they’re a mobile user, and your full site if they’re a desktop user.
Take a look at this article on the Google Webmasters Blog:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
This line is key: ‘With rel="canonical", properties of the two URLs are consolidated in our index and search results display wikia.com's intended version.’
Let me know if there’s something I’ve missed here, but it looks to me as though you are using the rel=canonical tag correctly.
Thanks,
Tom
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
-
How do you link your adaptive mobile site to Google Analytics?
With Google now saying they're putting a lot more emphasis on mobile sites, we recently got notifications from Google Webmaster Tools saying that some of our pages are not built for mobile. Some of these pages, however have an adaptive page that when you visit from a mobile phone (m.mysite.com), you're taken to instead of the desktop version. My question is, how do I let Google know that I have an adaptive site and not get penalized for poor mobile usability? I already have Google Analytics on the mobile site, I just need to somehow let Webmaster tools / Google's web crawlers know that they should be looking to my mobile site for usability, not the desktop site. Any advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Ditigal_Taylor0 -
Search results indexed
Hi there, is is bad practice in seo to have search results for products indexed? For example a search result of holidays to Ibiza, with lots of deals coming up? its a search query url that would be indexed, with just an image and price per product on the page, with about 10 per page? Any advice appreciated.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
301 redirecting old content from one site to updated content on a different site
I have a client with two websites. Here are some details, sorry I can't be more specific! Their older site -- specific to one product -- has a very high DA and about 75K visits per month, 80% of which comes from search engines. Their newer site -- focused generally on the brand -- is their top priority. The content here is much better. The vast majority of visits are from referrals (mainly social channels and an email newsletter) and direct traffic. Search traffic is relatively low though. I really want to boost search traffic to site #2. And I'd like to piggy back off some of the search traffic from site #1. Here's my question: If a particular article on site #1 (that ranks very well) needs to be updated, what's the risk/reward of updating the content on site #2 instead and 301 redirecting the original post to the newer post on site #2? Part 2: There are dozens of posts on site #1 that can be improved and updated. Is there an extra risk (or diminishing returns) associated with doing this across many posts? Hope this makes sense. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | djreich0 -
Mobile Site & SEO
If i create a mobile site for a client will google crawl that site for mobile results or will it effect my rankings. My guess is no, just want to make sure. Obviously code will be different.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Getting a citation page indexed
Howdy mozzers, I have a citation on a .govt domain with 2 links pointing to my site. The page is not indexed by Google, bing or yahoo. URL; http://www.familyservices.govt.nz/directory/viewprovider.htm?id=17077 I have tried getting the paged indexed by building bookmark links to it. I have tweeted the url and gotten a few re-tweets for it. But no luck. The page has got no nofollow meta tag. Other listings have been indexed by google. Could someone please advise on means to help me get the page indexed? A strategy that I have not yet tried is submitting a sitemap that includes the external url as I am not sure if it is possible to include url's not part of my domain. Any advice, help would be greatly appreciated. viva le SEOmoz Thanks
Technical SEO | | ihms1 -
How do I get content to be indexed at the top?
I have a paragraph at the top of my homepage. I was told I could use css to make the content visually appear at the bottom of the page but it would still get indexed at the top of the page, still giving it the same level of importance. Can anyone tell me how to do this?
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0 -
Https indexed - though a no index no follow tag has been added
Hi, The https-pages of our booking section are being indexed by Google. We added But the pages are still being indexed. What can I do to exclude these URL's from the Google index? Thank you very much in advance! Kind regards, Dennis Overbeek ACSI Publishing | dennis@acsi.eu
Technical SEO | | SEO_ACSI0 -
If I redirect my WordPress blog to my main site, will it help my main site's SEO?
I have separate sites for my blog and main website. I'd like to link them in a way that enables the blog to boost my main site's SEO. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks in advance for any advice...
Technical SEO | | matt-145670