A few important mobile SEO questions
-
I have a few basic questions about mobile SEO. I'd appreciate if any of you fabulous Mozzers can enlighten me.
Our site has a parallel mobile site with the same urls, using an m. domain for mobile and www. for desktop. On mobile pages, we have a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the matching desktop URL and on desktop pages we have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to the matching mobile URL. When someone visits a www. page using a mobile device, we 301 them to the mobile version.
Questions:
1. Do I want my mobile pages to be indexed by Google? From Tom's (very helpful) answers here, it seems that I only want Google indexing the full site pages and if the mobile pages are indexed it's actually a duplicate content issue. This is really confusing to me since Google knows that it's not duplicate content based on the canonical tag. But - he makes a good point - what is the value of having the mobile page indexed if the same page on desktop is indexed (I know that Google is indexing both because I see them in search results. When I search on mobile Google serves the mobile page and when I search on desktop Google serves me the desktop page.)? Are these pages competing with each other? Currently, we are doing everything we can do ensure that our mobile pages are crawled (deeply) and indexed, but now I'm not sure what the value of this is? Please share your knowledge.
2. Is a mobile page's ranking affected by social shares of the desktop version of the same page? Currently, when someone uses the share buttons on our mobile site, we share the desktop url (www. - not m.). The reason we do this is that we are afraid that if people are sharing our content with 2 different url's (m.mysite.com/some_post and www.mysite.com/some_post) the share count will not be aggregated for both url's. What I'm wondering is: will this have a negative effect on mobile SEO, since it will seem to Google that our mobile pages have no shares, or is this not a problem, since the desktop pages have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to mobile pages, so Google gives the same ranking to the mobile page as the desktop page (which IS being shared)?
-
Thanks so much!
This is exactly what I wanted to know.
-
After a pretty long conversation a while ago with Google's John Mueller, we tok the plunge and developed mobile version of our site.
We then went on to discuss how Google ranks mobile. He mentioned that it works like a swap, it will look at the content on your desktop version and determine from that what page to display in Google mobile. So a page could simply have little to no text but rank in mobile for the text that is on teh desktop version. Its al bit of a flaw in some ways.
However a big thing taken into account is if your site is mobile optimized, if Google was unable to index your pages it would not be able to determine if you had optimized for mobile and would decrease you ranking opportunity.
Duplicate content is not an issue, especially if its marked as alternate/canonical
As the alternate works like a swap it the social is also not an issue, in fact you are better in some ways having all social and all link building going to one place.
For example my co.uk has no links social shares etc.. its all on my .com, when a user searches for my site in google.co.uk, Google looks for what site ranks best and then looks to see if there is an alternative it should swap out in its place.
So if you had some shares on one and some shares on another it would be less powerful than all on one site combined.
Hope that makes sense?
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
-
10 quick questions for SEO experts!
Hey guys! I'm working to build something to make technical SEO audit less painful and I'd like to hear from other SEO experts. Can I ask you to answer this quick survey: https://mykoto.typeform.com/to/R5Gvyr THANKS!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jbrisebois0 -
SEO - is it site or page
Hi When we're talking about SEO does the search engine only look at the whole site in general or do they look at the individual page when we're talking about SERP? So if you have a keyword "my search term" Does the search engine look at the site first or the page with the term on then rank you or is it the page then the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
Are backlinks the most important factor in SEO?
I have had an agency state that "Backlinks are the most important factor in SEO". That is how they are justifying their strategy of approaching bloggers. I believe there are a lot more factors than that including Target Market definition, Keyword identification an build content based on these factors. What's everyone's thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndySalmons0 -
Redirection question
How would I redirect this URL: http://www.members.mysite.com/ to this URL: http://www.mysite.com/ ? I cant figure it out
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Canonical Related question
I have a site where we have search and result pages, google webmaster tool was giving me duplicate content error for page 1 / 2 / 3 etc etc so i have added canonical on these pages like http://www.business2sell.com/businesses/california/ Is this is correct way of using canonical ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | manish_khanna0 -
SEO from Godaddy How Good is it?
http://www.godaddy.com/search-engine/seo-services.aspx?ci=44163 it said "Includes Standard Search Engine Visibility to Improve Search Rankings" it begs for question... Search Engine Visibility??? Improve SERP?!?!!? is it really that good? O.o; or have i successfully been eaten my promotional messages? Can anyone with experience with them share some information with me ? 🙂 (The price tag is mighty interesting)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IKT0 -
Whitelabel stores and consequences for SEO
Hello I have a very important question to you. We are planning to a open 2 – 5 “whitelabel” web shops in each country that run on the same platform and server (Demandware) as our current web sites. Each white label site will have own domain. The product selection will be identical and prices will be identical, but the sites will be branded differently with other logo and colors and name for the store. The question is about the consequences for SEO for such project. What are the risks for the rankings for us, if the whitelabel products have same product descriptions and names as our existing web shop has? Will it affect our rankings? How would google rank 3 whitelabel stores that have own domains but otherwise identical product content? What is the minimal that should be changed from SEO point of view in order to avoid Google penalties or ranking problems? Looking forward to hear from you Greetings,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EuropeanSEOguy
Rolf0