Can Mobile Results show on Desktop results?

[CayenneRed89]

Hi everyone,

I have a question - I have a client who has told me they had a problem with duplicate mobile pages showing on desktop results in place of their main URL pages

They have a mobile domain mobile.domain.com.

My understanding is that Google can differentiate mobile and nonmobile pages and hence you cannot see mobile results on desktop and duplication of pages is not a problem.

Has anyone had this problem before?  Is this possible?

Thanks

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Cayenne. This can happen in cases where Google views the mobile site as a non-mobile or as the only available result to a desktop search query.  Here's a recent blog post from Google during at the time of the change: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/04/faqs-april-21st-mobile-friendly.html

What you'll want to check is the mobile friendliness and load speeds of both the mobile and desktop sites. At times people have seen very slow loading desktop sites with lots of PageSpeed issues get outranked by the lighter mobile versions. Next, use the various checks mentioned on that page to ensure that mobile.domain.com is indeed viewed as mobile by Google. And here's Moz's guide to provide an overall picture of what the mobile site should accomplish: https://moz.com/learn/seo/mobile-optimization

Cheers!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Cayenne

I would make sure that you and your client read through Google's resources on Separate URLs for mobile, as there are specific steps you need to take to ensure that Google can differentiate between the mobile and desktop versions of your site.

Have a mobile.domain.com is not enough - you need to have specific HTML on your site for this to work.

If they do have this code on their site, I recommend going through Mobile's SEO resources to pinpoint where issues are on your site.

If you want to provide the URL here so everyone can take a look, that'd be a huge help!

Good luck!