Mobile Search Results Include Pages Meant Only for Desktops/Laptops
-
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.
-
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
-
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
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 -
Will Reduced Bounce Rate, Increased Pages/Session, Increased Session Duration-RESULT IN BETTER RANKING?
Our relaunched website has a much lower bounce rate (66% before, now 58%) increased pages per session (1.89 before, now 3.47) and increased session duration (1:33 before, now 3:47). The relaunch was December 20th. Should these improvements result in an improvement in Google rank? How about in MOZ authority? We have not significantly changed the content of the site but the UX has been greatly improved. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
Google crawling 200 page site thousands of times/day. Why?
Hello all, I'm looking at something a bit wonky for one of the websites I manage. It's similar enough to other websites I manage (built on a template) that I'm surprised to see this issue occurring. The xml sitemap submitted shows Google there are 229 pages on the site. Starting in the beginning of December Google really ramped up their intensity in crawling the site. At its high point Google crawled 13,359 pages in a single day. I mentioned I manage other similar sites - this is a very unusual spike. There are no resources like infinite scroll that auto generates content and would cause Google some grief. So follow up questions to my "why?" is "how is this affecting my SEO efforts?" and "what do I do about it?". I've never encountered this before, but I think limiting my crawl budget would be treating the symptom instead of finding the cure. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks! *edited for grammar.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brettmandoes0 -
Google Search Console - Indexed Pages
I am performing a site audit and looking at the "Index Status Report" in GSC. This shows a total of 17 URLs have been indexed. However when I look at the Sitemap report in GSC it shows 9,000 pages indexed. Also, when I perform a site: search on Google I get 24,000 results. Can anyone help me to explain these anomalies?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | richdan0 -
CMS Pages - Multiple URLS (/)
Hi guys, this type of question has been asked a few times before but I couldn't find something that told me what i need so apologies if its a tad repetitive. I use Magento, and have several pages using its CMS. However, it produces 2 URLS for each page with a simple /. For example, website.com/hire
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
website.com/hire/ I know google treats this as 2 separate pages, which would be the better solution. 1. Write a URL re-write for every CMS page
RewriteRule ^hire$ http://www.website.com/hire/ [R=301,L] (Is this right?) 2. Write a general rewrite rule to always add the /
No idea where to begin with this 3. Add a Canonical tag to the page which i think is possible in magento by adding this to the Custom Design Layout XML option in the page CMS. <action method="addLinkRel"></action> <rel>canonical</rel> <href>http://www.website.com/hire/</href> This would make the /hire/ page self-reference and the /hire page reference the /hire/ page I think. Which one of these solutions is the best and any pointers with the coding would be grand.0 -
Should I noindex the site search page? It is generating 4% of my organic traffic.
I read about some recommendations to noindex the URL of the site search.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Checked in analytics that site search URL generated about 4% of my total organic search traffic (<2% of sales). My reasoning is that site search may generate duplicated content issues and may prevent the more relevant product or category pages from showing up instead. Would you noindex this page or not? Any thoughts?0 -
To index or not to index search pages - (Panda related)
Hi Mozzers I have a WordPress site with Relevanssi the search engine plugin, free version. Questions: Should I let Google index my site's SERPS? I am scared the page quality is to thin, and then Panda bear will get angry. This plugin (or my previous search engine plugin) created many of these "no-results" uris: /?s=no-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Akids+wall&cat=no-results&pg=6 I have added a robots.txt rule to disallow these pages and did a GWT URL removal request. But links to these pages are still being displayed in Google's SERPS under "repeat the search with the omitted results included" results. So will this affect me negatively or are these results harmless? What exactly is an omitted result? As I understand it is that Google found a link to a page they but can't display it because I block GoogleBot. Thanx in advance guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClassifiedsKing0 -
Internal Search / Faceted Navigation
Hi there, I'm working on an e-learning site with the following content pages: main page, category pages, course pages, author pages, tag pages. We will also have an internal search for users to search by keyword for courses & authors & categories. Is it still recommend to "noindex, follow" and disallow in robots.txt internal search results? Or for a site like this, is it better to use faceted navigation? It seems that faceted navigation is mostly for e-commerce sites. What is the latest thinking on SEO best practices for internal search result pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mindflash0