URL Errors for SmartPhone in Google Search Console/Webmaster Tools
-
Howdy all,
In recent weeks I have seen a steady increase in the number of smartphone related url errors on Googles Search Console (formerly webmaster tools).
THe crawler appears to be searching for a /m/ or /mobile/ directory within the URLs. Why is it doing this? Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately this is for an unresponsive site, would setting the viewport help stop the issue for know until my new responsive site is launched shortly.
Cheers fello Mozzers
Tim
-
Haha, you wrote this as I was writing my reply to you both below. Yup! That earlier Q&A is a great resource. Screaming Frog should give you insight into where the links might have gone bad. 301 redirection is always an option as well for the few links that may be causing issues. Cheers!
-
Have you tried running something like Screaming Frog to see if you can duplicate the 404s? http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/broken-link-checker/ That might give you greater visibility into this. Beyond that I'd do Google searches on the various plugins you have running to see if they do something similar to that Yoast example regarding partially publishing draft content. It's likely that you'll find someone with a similar issue at some point in the past.
If you want greater insight from the community, post the URLs here and people will be able to investigate directly. Best of luck!
-
I have just found this post which seems to outline most of my issues.
See here. Although I am not sure it will help you or not Trenton. I am going to do a little Screaming Frog search to see if there is an errand link.
-
I too am using Yoast and still getting these troublesome errors on GSC. We also do a lots of draft posting, but for me the error is not solely restricted to an area of our site that uses wordpress, it happens globally to our site.
I have checked the sitemaps on both desktop and mobile and both are returning the same for me.
-
Looks exactly the same on my phone as it does on desktop. The pages coming up as 404s in GSC under Smartphone are NOT listed on this page-sitemap.xml page.
-
I am using Yoast but I am only using the Page sitemap, and it is the only one I have submitted for the affected sites. Again, this doesn't really explain why it's coming up under Smartphone and not Desktop. Also, Google does tell you where these are linking from, and it does say the sitemap page, but when i looked at the sitemap page, these pages are not listed. I am looking at them on my desktop though and not my smartphone. If I looked at the /page-sitemap.xml page on my phone would it look any different? :::quickly picks up his phone and tests it out:::
-
Without looking at the specific site in question my guess is that the draft is publishing some amount of its content to either a sitemap or other area of your site that is then prompting a crawl from Google. This is sometimes an issue with various plugins, for example Yoast was doing this with the attachment-sitemap.xml a while ago, see: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/sitemap-probelm (last comment).
Aside from files such as these, you could run a crawler like Screaming Frog or Xenu to help track down which locations might be pointing to the 404 pages. Cheers!
-
I'm seeing similar issues. I was going to post a question, but found this when I searched.
I'm using Wordpress and I have some theme pages that I have set as drafts, so that I can access them on my end, but the public would get a 404. In Google Search Console, under Desktop, none of these pages are coming up. But under Smartphone, somehow Google is finding these unpublished draft URLs as 404 Not Found errors.
My question is why is Google seeing these pages, and also why it's triggering on Smartphone only and not desktop. And my last question is the obvious one: how do I fix this!?
Thanks!
-
Hi Tim. Can you share the domain name that is experiencing these errors? If it's private, feel free to DM it.
Broadly, I'd look for any backlinks that are pointed at a missing /m/ or /mobile/ folder, sitemaps that are pointing at such, internal links that are doing likewise. If the site is completely new and unresponsive I'd do as you suggested yourself and throttle down the crawlers until you're ready to fully launch. Cheers!
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
-
Robots blocked by pages webmasters tools
a mistake made in software. How can I solve the problem quickly? help me. XTRjH
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mihoreis0 -
Google Search Console Site Property Questions
I have a few questions regarding Google Search Console. Google Search Console tells you to add all versions of your website https, http, www, and non-www. 1.) Do I than add ALL the information for ALL versions? Sitemaps, preferred site, etc.? 2.) If yes, when I add sitemaps to each version, do I add the sitemap url of the site version I'm on or my preferred version? - For instance when adding a sitemap to a non-www version of the site, do I use the non-www version of the sitemap? Or since I prefer a https://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml do I use it there? 3.) When adding my preferred site (www or non-www) do I use my preferred site on all site versions? (https, http, www, and non-www) Thanks in advance. Answers vary throughout Google!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mike.Bean0 -
Client wants to remove mobile URLs from their sitemap to avoid indexing issues. However this will require SEVERAL billing hours. Is having both mobile/desktop URLs in a sitemap really that detrimental to search indexing?
We had an enterprise client ask to remove mobile URLs from their sitemaps. For their website both desktop & mobile URLs are combined into one sitemap. Their website has a mobile template (not a responsive website) and is configured properly via Google's "separate URL" guidelines. Our client is referencing a statement made from John Mueller that having both mobile & desktop sitemaps can be problematic for indexing. Here is the article https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-sitemaps-20137.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
We would be happy to remove the mobile URLs from their sitemap. However this will unfortunately take several billing hours for our development team to implement and QA. This will end up costing our client a great deal of money when the task is completed. Is it worth it to remove the mobile URLs from their main website to be in adherence to John Mueller's advice? We don't believe these extra mobile URLs are harming their search indexing. However we can't find any sources to explain otherwise. Any advice would be appreciated. Thx.0 -
Change of Address in Google Search Console
I have merged domains before and it went rather smoothly following the Moz Guide - https://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects . I've got a new challenge ahead of me though in that a client is buying the blog subdirectory associated with another domain. So it's the blog only, not the complete domain therefore a change of address for a site section doesn't exist. I believe the course of action will be the same except we'll just skip the change of address step since the original owner wants to maintain the TLD. Part of the contract is that we'll get the content which will be ported over to our domain and he'll maintain the 301's as requested and into perpetuity. Our domain is not brand new and has some credible links. Anyone encounter a transition of a partial domain before? Thanks for your help/suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoaustin0 -
URL Parameters Settings in WMT/Search Console
On an large ecommerce site the main navigation links to URLs that include a legacy parameter. The parameter doesn’t actually seem to do anything to change content - it doesn’t narrow or specify content, nor does it currently track sessions. We’ve set the canonical for these URLs to be without the parameter. (We did this when we started seeing that Google was stripping out the parameter in the majority of SERP results themselves.) We’re trying to best strategize on how to set the parameters in WMT (search console). Our options are to set to: 1. No: Doesn’t affect page content’ - and then the Crawl field in WMT is auto-set to ‘Representative URL’. (Note, that it's unclear what ‘Representative URL’ is defined as. Google’s documentation suggests that a representative URL is a canonical URL, and we've specifically set canonicals to be without the parameter so does this contradict? ) OR 2. ‘Yes: Changes, reorders, or narrows page content’ And then it’s a question of how to instruct Googlebot to crawl these pages: 'Let Googlebot decide' OR 'No URLs'. The fundamental issue is whether the parameter settings are an index signal or crawl signal. Google documents them as crawl signals, but if we instruct Google not to crawl our navigation how will it find and pass equity to the canonical URLs? Thoughts? Posted by Susan Schwartz, Kahena Digital staff member
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AriNahmani0 -
URL Parameter Being Improperly Crawled & Indexed by Google
Hi All, We just discovered that Google is indexing a subset of our URL’s embedded with our analytics tracking parameter. For the search “dresses” we are appearing in position 11 (page 2, rank 1) with the following URL: www.anthropologie.com/anthro/category/dresses/clothes-dresses.jsp?cm_mmc=Email--Anthro_12--070612_Dress_Anthro-_-shop You’ll note that “cm_mmc=Email” is appended. This is causing our analytics (CoreMetrics) to mis-attribute this traffic and revenue to Email vs. SEO. A few questions: 1) Why is this happening? This is an email from June 2012 and we don’t have an email specific landing page embedded with this parameter. Somehow Google found and indexed this page with these tracking parameters. Has anyone else seen something similar happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevin_reyes
2) What is the recommended method of “politely” telling Google to index the version without the tracking parameters? Some thoughts on this:
a. Implement a self-referencing canonical on the page.
- This is done, but we have some technical issues with the canonical due to our ecommerce platform (ATG). Even though page source code looks correct, Googlebot is seeing the canonical with a JSession ID.
b. Resubmit both URL’s in WMT Fetch feature hoping that Google recognizes the canonical.
- We did this, but given the canonical issue it won’t be effective until we can fix it.
c. URL handling change in WMT
- We made this change, but it didn’t seem to fix the problem
d. 301 or No Index the version with the email tracking parameters
- This seems drastic and I’m concerned that we’d lose ranking on this very strategic keyword Thoughts? Thanks in advance, Kevin0 -
Google webmaster tool (GWT) owner removal issue
Hi! I have a new client, the former agency added the client property with the agency account so we had to create a new GA account (as you can’t transfer ownership at the account level) but we also kept access to the former account to keep historical data. We were granted owner access to the GWT (which is more flexible, you can remove owners and creators) and we now want to remove former agency users. We have 3 adresses. One was verified with delegation method (no pb for removal), one with meta tag (no pb) and one with Google Analytics. Here it becomes tricky as Google says regarding GA verif method “If this account was verified using a Google Analytics tracking code, you should make sure that the user you want to unverify is no longer an administrator on the Analytics account. Otherwise, removal may not be permanent”. The thing is that this user has the same email address as the one used to create the agency GA account (no ownership transfer) so I basically can’t remove admin rights. The other possibility, as Google mentions when I try to unlink this user, is “remove the administrator status in Google Analytics or delete the Google Analytics tracking code on the website”. But we don’t want to remove the code as we still want to track data with the former account for historical analysis purposes. Has anyone ever faced this situation? Do you know how to handle this? Do you think that unlinking the GWT and the GA accounts will unverify the GA method? Many thanks in advance ! Ennick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ennick0 -
New Google AdWords Keyword Tool - What Can We Do?
What options do we have for keyword research now that Google is switching from the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to the Keyword Planner??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alhallinan0