Website with only a portion being 'mobile friendly' -- what to tell Google?
-
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
-
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
-
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.
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
-
Removing indexed internal search pages from Google when it's driving lots of traffic?
Hi I'm working on an E-Commerce site and the internal Search results page is our 3rd most popular landing page. I've also seen Google has often used this page as a "Google-selected canonical" on Search Console on a few pages, and it has thousands of these Search pages indexed. Hoping you can help with the below: To remove these results, is it as simple as adding "noindex/follow" to Search pages? Should I do it incrementally? There are parameters (brand, colour, size, etc.) in the indexed results and maybe I should block each one of them over time. Will there be an initial negative impact on results I should warn others about? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
International website. Di I need a new website
i am looking to expand from the UK and open a location in the US. i curretly have a .co.uk domain. what would you recommend I do with th website, create a new one wth a .com domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Mobile Friendly Site yet rankings are in alot of cases worse than desktop
Hi All, We made our Website mobile responsive well in advance of the recent mobile algorithm changes . We only have a couple of pages with minor errors but yet our mobile rankings have not improved that much (maybe 1 place) and in alot of cases, we rank higher on desktop than we do on mobile for the same term etc. No the ranking boost is minimal at best and worse in many cases. I have checked our site on google mobile test and we are mobile friendly and on page speed test our mobile site is 99/100 user experience etc. Just wondered if anyone else has found the same ? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Any issue? Redirect 100's of domains into one website's internal pages
Hi all, Imagine if you will I was the owner of many domains, say 100 demographically rich kwd domains & my plan was to redirect these into one website - each into a different relevant subfolder. e.g. www.dewsburytilers..com > www.brandname.com/dewsbury/tilers.html www.hammersmith-tilers.com > www.brandname.com/hammersmith/tilers.html www.tilers-horsforth.com > www.brandname.com/horsforth/tilers.html another hundred or so 301 redirects...the backlinks to these domains were slim but relevant (the majority of the domains do not have any backlinks at all - can anyone see a problem with this practice? If so, what would your recommendations be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fergclaw0 -
How to ask customers to +1 the page of the service/product they used and liked on Google+ of website
What format to use (how to write) to ask customers to +1 the page of the service/product they used and liked on Google+?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MasonBaker0 -
For a mobile website, is it better to use a 301 vs. a 302 redirect?
We are vetting a vendor for our mobile website and they are recommending using a 302 redirect with rel=canonical vs. a 301 redirect due to 301 caching issues. All the research I've done shows that a 301 is by far the better way to go do to proper indexing, which in turn will enhance our page authority. Thoughts on why a 302 would be a better fit than a 301 on our mobile site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seohdsupply1 -
How do I get rid of all the 404 errors in google webmaster tools after building a new website under the same domiain
I recently launched my new website under the same domain as the old one. I did all the important 301 redirects but it seems like every url that was in google index is still their but now with a 404 error code. How can I get rid of this problem? For example if you google my company name 'romancing diamonds' half the link under the name are 404 errors. Look at my webmaster tools and you'll see the same thing. Is their anyway to remove all those previous url's from google's indexes and start anew? Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Romancing0 -
Need to duplicate the index for Google in a way that's correct
Usually duplicated content is a brief to fix. I find myself in a little predicament: I have a network of career oriented websites in several countries. the problem is that for each country we use a "master" site that aggregates all ads working as a portal. The smaller nisched sites have some of the same info as the "master" sites since it is relevant for that site. The "master" sites have naturally gained the index for the majority of these ads. So the main issue is how to maintain the ads on the master sites and still make the nische sites content become indexed in a way that doesn't break Google guide lines. I can of course fix this in various ways ranging from iframes(no index though) and bullet listing and small adjustments to the headers and titles on the content on the nisched sites, but it feels like I'm cheating if I'm going down that path. So the question is: Have someone else stumbled upon a similar problem? If so...? How did you fix it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gustav-Northclick0