Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Mobile Googlebot vs Desktop Googlebot - GWT reports - Crawl errors
-
Hi Everyone,
I have a very specific SEO question. I am doing a site audit and one of the crawl reports is showing tons of 404's for the "smartphone" bot and with very recent crawl dates. If our website is responsive, and we do not have a mobile version of the website I do not understand why the desktop report version has tons of 404's and yet the smartphone does not. I think I am not understanding something conceptually.
I think it has something to do with this little message in the Mobile crawl report.
"Errors that occurred only when your site was crawled by Googlebot (errors didn't appear for desktop)."
If I understand correctly, the "smartphone" report will only show URL's that are not on the desktop report. Is this correct?
-
Hey Carla,
I'm not entirely sure what you're saying with:
"one of the crawl reports is showing tons of 404's for the "smartphone" bot and with very recent crawl dates. If our website is responsive, and we do not have a mobile version of the website I do not understand why the desktop report version has tons of 404's and yet the smartphone does not. I think I am not understanding something conceptually."
You say that the smartphone bot is seeing tons of 404s and the desktop report is showing tons of 404s, but the smartphone does not. If you can clarify that, I can probably better answer your question.
However, the answer is likely that Google may decide not to crawl URLs that it has already identified as 404s in one context. That is to say if they identify URLs on the mobile device as 404s they will know not to crawl them if they encounter them on desktop and vice versa.
-Mike
-
Ok I forgot to add something to this as well. Why would the URLS show up on the smartphone report if they are not on the desktop report? Afterall a 404 from either device is still a 404?
Thanks
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
-
.com vs .co.uk
Hi, we are a UK based company and we have a lot of links from .com websites. Does the fact that they are .com or .co.uk affect the quality of the links for a UK website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Absolute vs. Relative Canonical Links
Hi Moz Community, I have a client using relative links for their canonicals (vs. absolute) Google appears to be following this just fine, but bing, etc. are still sending organic traffic to the non-canonical links. It's a drupal setup. Anyone have advice? Should I recommend that all canonical links be absolute? They are strapped for resources, so this would be a PITA if it won't make a difference. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SimpleSearch1 -
Duplicate H1 on single page for mobile and desktop
I have a responsive site and whilst this works and is liked by google from a user perspective the pages could look better on mobile. I have a wordpress site and use the Divi Builder with elegant themes and have developed a separate page header for mobile that uses a manipulated background image and smaller H1 font size. When crawling the site two H1s can be detected on the same page - they are exactly the same words and only one will show according to device. However, I need to know if this will cause me a problem with google and SEO. As the mobile changes are not just font size but also adaptations to some visual elements it is not something I can simply alter in the CSS. Would appreciate some input as to whether this is a problem or not
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cells4Life0 -
How search engines look at collapse content in mobile while on desktop it open by default?
Hello everyone!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Roi_Bar
To have a mobile friendly UX we chose to collapse some of the page content.
On the desktop it is in open mode by default and user can see the whole content.
Does the search engines see the content even if it's collapse? is the collapse mode on the mobile only can hurt us with SERP ranking? okgF0pX 1LU6utU1 -
Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages
We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example. One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com. I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past. What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
Mobile website on a different URL address?
My client has an old eCommerce website that is ranking high in Google. The website is not responsive for mobile devices. The client wants to create a responsive design mobile version of the website and put it on a different URL address. There would be a link on the current page pointing to the external mobile website. Is this approach ok or not? The reason why the client does not want to change the design of the current website is because he does not have the budget to do so and there are a lot of pages that would need to be moved to the new design. Any advice would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andypatalak0 -
Canonical tag + HREFLANG vs NOINDEX: Redundant?
Hi, We launched our new site back in Sept 2013 and to control indexation and traffic, etc we only allowed the search engines to index single dimension pages such as just category, brand or collection but never both like category + brand, brand + collection or collection + catergory We are now opening indexing to double faceted page like category + brand and the new tag structure would be: For any other facet we're including a "noindex, follow" meta tag. 1. My question is if we're including a "noindex, follow" tag to select pages do we need to include a canonical or hreflang tag afterall? Should we include it either way for when we want to remove the "noindex"? 2. Is the x-default redundant? Thanks for any input. Cheers WMCA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WMCA0 -
External 404 vs Internal 404
Which one is bad? External - when someone adds an incorrect link to your site, maybe does a typo when linking to an inner page. This page never existed on your site, google shows this as a 404 in Webmaster tools. Internal - a page existed, google indexed it, and you deleted it and didnt add a 301. Internal ones are in the webmaster's control, and i can understand if google gets upset if it sees a 404 for a URL that existed before, however surely "externally created" 404 shoudnt cause any harm cause that page never existed. And someone has inserted an incorrect link to your site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0