Is there an advantage to using rel=canonical rather than noindex on pages on my mobile site (m.company.com)?
-
Is there an advantage to using link rel=alternate (as recommended by Google) rather than noindex on pages on my mobile site (m.company.com)?
The content on the mobile pages is very similar to the content on the desktop site. I see Google recommends canonical and alternate tags, but what are the benefits of using those rather than noindex?
-
If we can't change the tags before launch, but change them immediately after, how long does it take Google to recognize the change and adjust our ranking? Will we be digging ourselves out of a hole if we implement it the wrong way and fix it shortly after?
-
Hi Jennifer,
You should definitely index the mobile site. As long as you correctly implement the mobile switchboard tags (which are basically a mobile-specific version of the standard rel=canonical/rel=alternate approach) this will not lead to duplication but rather to the correct version of the page showing up for mobile searches.
There is some discussion around whether or not Google currently has a separate index for mobile search (in any case they are likely to in future if they don't currently) but they definitely have a separate mobile crawler, which spoofs an iPhone user-agent. If you noindex all the mobile pages and redirect mobile user-agents to mobile versions of your pages, what the mobile crawler will see is your whole site as noindexed.
-
Isn't a noindex page still crawlable though? We are not disallowing it in robots.txt - they just don't want both the mobile site and the desktop site showing up in the search index.
My developers are telling me that if the desktop site redirects a mobile user to the mobile site, it will get the mobile friendly tag. (It's a separate subsite, rather than dynamic serving on the same URL).
-
Google gives mobile friendly pages preference on mobile users SERPs. When they crawl your site they determine if a page is "mobile friendly" and they index it to serve.
Since the mobile-friendly update on April 21st of this year, Google will favor mobile friendly and responsive pages on mobile device SERPs.
Use this tool to verify that your pages are mobile friendly
If you no index your mobile pages, they will not be crawled and assessed as mobile friendly. Thereby negating the whole point of having a mobile version of your site. Stick to Rel=canonical to tell google which page is authentic/original. Add the rel="canonical" tag to point to the desktop and the rel="alternate" on the desktop site to point to the mobile site.
Check mobile configuration - go to option, Dynamic Serving
Use the bots name "Googlebot-Mobile" to differentiate which version of your site to serve. Serve up the mobile version when that bot name visits for a crawl. Check in the User-agent header.
Specifically referenced -
"Once Googlebot-Mobile crawls your URLs, we then check for whether the URL is viewable on a mobile device. Pages we determine aren't viewable on a mobile phone won't be included in our mobile site index (although they may be included in the regular web index)."
Also, check out the Webmasters Mobile Documentation.
Once Googlebot-Mobile crawls your URLs, we then check for whether the URL is viewable on a mobile device. Pages we determine aren't viewable on a mobile phone won't be included in our mobile site index (although they may be included in the regular web index).
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
-
Internal search pages (and faceted navigation) solutions for 2018! Canonical or meta robots "noindex,follow"?
There seems to conflicting information on how best to handle internal search results pages. To recap - they are problematic because these pages generally result in lots of query parameters being appended to the URL string for every kind of search - whilst the title, meta-description and general framework of the page remain the same - which is flagged in Moz Pro Site Crawl - as duplicate, meta descriptions/h1s etc. The general advice these days is NOT to disallow these pages in robots.txt anymore - because there is still value in their being crawled for all the links that appear on the page. But in order to handle the duplicate issues - the advice varies into two camps on what to do: 1. Add meta robots tag - with "noindex,follow" to the page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWEMII
This means the page will not be indexed with all it's myriad queries and parameters. And so takes care of any duplicate meta /markup issues - but any other links from the page can still be crawled and indexed = better crawling, indexing of the site, however you lose any value the page itself might bring.
This is the advice Yoast recommends in 2017 : https://yoast.com/blocking-your-sites-search-results/ - who are adamant that Google just doesn't like or want to serve this kind of page anyway... 2. Just add a canonical link tag - this will ensure that the search results page is still indexed as well.
All the different query string URLs, and the array of results they serve - are 'canonicalised' as the same.
However - this seems a bit duplicitous as the results in the page body could all be very different. Also - all the paginated results pages - would be 'canonicalised' to the main search page - which we know Google states is not correct implementation of canonical tag
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html this picks up on this older discussion here from 2012
https://moz.com/community/q/internal-search-rel-canonical-vs-noindex-vs-robots-txt
Where the advice was leaning towards using canonicals because the user was seeing a percentage of inbound into these search result pages - but i wonder if it will still be the case ? As the older discussion is now 6 years old - just wondering if there is any new approach or how others have chosen to handle internal search I think a lot of the same issues occur with faceted navigation as discussed here in 2017
https://moz.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation1 -
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
Do I need to use a trailing slash to homepage in canonical and hreflang?
Currently I have a 301 redirect from
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
https://www.mysite.com/
to
https://www.mysite.com And in my canonical and hreflang and also insite links I use consistently https://www.mysite.com without trailing slash. Is this OK? Or do I need to add a trailing slash?0 -
SEO - is it site or page
Hi When we're talking about SEO does the search engine only look at the whole site in general or do they look at the individual page when we're talking about SERP? So if you have a keyword "my search term" Does the search engine look at the site first or the page with the term on then rank you or is it the page then the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Is their value in linking to PPC landing pages and using rel="canonical"
I have ppc landing pages that are similar to my seo page. The pages are shorter with less text with a focus on converting visitors further along in the purchase cycle. My questions are: 1. Is there a benefit for having the orphan ppc pages indexed or should I no index them? 2. If indexing does provide benefits, should I create links from my site to the ppc pages or should I just submit them in a sitemap? 3. If indexed, should I use rel="canonical" and point the ppc versions to the appropriate organic page? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandExpSteve0 -
Using Canonical Attribute
Hi All, I am hoping you can help me? We have recently migrated to the Umbraco CMS and now have duplicate versions of the same page showing on different URLs. My understanding is that this is one of the major reasons for the rel=canonical tag. So am I right in saying that if I add the following to the page that I want to rank then this will work? I'm just a little worried as I have read some horror stories of people implementing this attribute incorrectly and getting into trouble. Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creditsafe0 -
Rel=canonical on image pages
Hi, Im working on a Wordpress hosted blog site. I recently did a "site:search" in Google for a specific article page to make sure it was getting crawled, and it returned three separate URLs in the search results. One was the article page, and the other two were the URLs that hosted the images that are found in the article. Would you suggest adding the rel=canonical tag to the pages that host the images so they point back to the actual context article page? Or are they fine being left alone? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench0 -
Best approach for a client with another site for the same company
I have a client who has an old website and company A handles the SEO campaign for this site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ao500000
My client wanted us to create a new website with unique content for the same company aiming to double his chances of ranking on the 1st of SERP's and eventually dominating it.
So we created the new site for him and handled it's SEO campaign. So far we are ranking decently on the search engines but we feel like we could do better. The site we are optimizing for him uses the same company, tracking number and a virtual address in the same city.
Do you think Google has a problem with this set up?
We have listed the new site in the citation directories but I'm worried that we are sending google mixed signals. The company has two listing on each directories, one for the old site and another for the new site.
Another thing, Google+ Local for the new site is created and verified but is not showing up in local pack.
What is the best way to approach this mess?
We are looking into ranking for both local & organic results.0