Website with only a portion being 'mobile friendly' -- what to tell Google?
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I have a website for desktop that does a lot of things, and have converted part of it do show pages in a mobile friendly format based on the users device. Not responsive design, but actual diff code with different formatting by mobile vs desktop--but each still share the same page url name. Google allows this approach.
The mobile-friendly part of the site is not as extensive as desktop, so there are pages that apply to the desktop but not for mobile. So the functionality is limited some for mobile devices, and therefore some pages should only be indexed for desktop users.
How should that page be handled for Google crawlers? If it is given a 404 not found for their mobile bot will Google properly still crawl it for the desktop, or will Google see that the url was flagged as 'not found' and not crawl it for the desktop?
I asked a similar question yest, but it was not stated clearly. Thanks,Ted
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Hi Giovatto,
Thanks for your thoughts. I had thought that too, but it looks to me like while it crawls both, it indexes only the desktop. I think it crawls the mobile to see what else mobile links to, but that the main purpose is to see if the pages render well for mobile. Here's my otherr thread that goes into this in more detail: http://moz.com/community/q/mobile-search-results-show-desktop-crawled-content
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I'm not 100% sure but I believe Google handles crawls for mobile and desktop separately. In Google Webmaster Tools, under the Crawl Issues section, there are separate sections for Mobile and Desktop issues.
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