Mobile Search Results Include Pages Meant Only for Desktops/Laptops

[friendoffood]

When I put in site:www.qjamba.com  on a mobile device it comes back with some of my mobile-friendly pages for that site(same url for mobile and desktop-just different formatting), and that's great.  HOWEVER, it also shows a whole bunch of the pages (not identified by Google as mobile-friendly) that are fine for desktop users but are not supposed to exist for the mobile users, because they are too slow.  Until a few days ago those pages were being redirected for mobile users to the home page.  I since have changed that to 404 not founds.

Do we know that Google keeps a mobile index separate from the desktop index?  If so, I would think that 404 should work..

How can I test whether the 404 not founds will remove a url so they DON'T appear on a mobile device when I put in site:www.qjamba.com (or a user searches) but DO appear on a desktop for the same command.

[friendoffood]

Hi Kristina,

I just responded to you on the other (related) issue at http://moz.com/community/q/mobile-search-results-show-desktop-crawled-content#reply_270529  before seeing your response here.  Sorry about that.

Thanks for your response.  It really hadn't occurred to me to allow mobile users to use those pages because the experience would be pretty bad for the most part, and a lot slower for those pages, but it definitely is a thought for solving my indexing issue.  I could give the mobile user a popup the first time they venture into the 'unmobile-friendly pages' as a heads up about which parts are mobile friendly and which aren't...I wonder though if Google will penalize the site or those pages in some way since it will not be able to render them as mobile friendly for a mobile device..EDIT: just saw this: http://www.cnet.com/news/make-web-sites-mobile-friendly-or-face-google-search-wrath/....anyway,  interesting alternative, It wouldn't be as easy as it sounds because of the degree of customization in menus I've done for the mobile pages, but may well be a lot easier than other alternatives..  Thanks very much!

Ted

[KristinaKledzik]

Hi again,

I'm not a developer, so I can't ask your direct question about how to return 404s to mobile visitors and 200s to desktop visitors, but I would like to weigh in on the best practices here.

The reason Google is continuing to index these pages even though they're not formatted for mobile is because Google wants to give mobile visitors access to the same information as desktop visitors. If there is content on your desktop site that isn't on your mobile site, Google will just return those desktop pages.

Standard options for you are:

• Allow mobile visitors to access those pages, knowing they won't have a great user experience, but allowing them to find exactly what they were looking for. You can use Google Analytics to understand which pages mobile visitors are seeing the most and prioritize converting those pages to mobile.
• For mobile pages that have consolidated content from desktop pages, you can rel="alternate" each desktop page to the consolidated mobile page.

Hope this helps!

Kristina