Google Indexing Desktop & Mobile Versions
-
We have a relatively new site and I have noticed recently that Google seems to be indexing both the mobile and the desktop version of our site. There are some queries where the mobile version will show up and sometimes both mobile and desktop show up. This can't be good. I would imagine that what is supposed to happen is that the desktop version is the one that should be indexed (always) and browser detection will load the mobile version where appropriate once the user is on the site.
Do you have any advice on what we should do to solve this problem as we are a bit stuck?
-
Have you got switchboard tags implemented? That should solve the issue.
-
You can easily restrict portions with robots.txt depending on how exactly your site is set up. So for instance, something like:
Desktop site: http://www.domain.com/robots.txt
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Disallow: /Mobile site:http://m.domain.com/robots.txt
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Allow: /Or
User-agent: *
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /mobile/
Allow: /
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /mobile/
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Disallow: /
Allow: /mobile/
User-agent: bingbot-mobile
Disallow: /
-
What we recommend is that you make sure that you're serving up the mobile version to Google's mobile crawler and the desktop version to Google's desktop crawler. You may be doing both, serving mobile pages to both the desktop and mobile crawlers.
I recommend taking a look at that to make sure it's not an issue. You can crawl your own site using something like Screaming Frog SEO spider and change the user agent to mobile vs. desktop to test it.
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
-
Adding /es version to google search console
I have a Wordpress site and we are using WPML for making it bilingual. The domain is: https://www.designerfreelance.net and for Spanish https://www.designerfreelance.net/es Do I have to add to Google search console the /es version? And the no www: https://www.designerfreelance.net https://www.designerfreelance.net/es https://designerfreelance.net https://designerfreelance.net/es and do I have to add the non ssl version? http://www.designerfreelance.net http://www.designerfreelance.net/es http://designerfreelance.net http://designerfreelance.net/es Thanks
Technical SEO | | Trazo0 -
What are best options for website built with navigation drop-down menus in JavaScript, to get those menus indexed by Google?
This concerns f5.com, a large website with navigation menus that drop down when hovered over. The sub nav items (example: “DDoS Protection”) are not cached by Google and therefore do not distribute internal links properly to help those sub-pages rank well. Best option naturally is to change the nav menus from JS to CSS but barring that, is there another option? Will Schema SiteNavigationElement work as an alternate?
Technical SEO | | CarlLarson0 -
Why are only a few of our pages being indexed
Recently rebuilt a site for an auctioneers, however it has a problem in that none of the lots and auctions are being indexed by Google on the new site, only the pages like About, FAQ, home, contact. Checking WMT shows that Google has crawled all the pages, and I've done a "Fetch as Google" on them and it loads up fine, so there's no crawling issues that is standing out. I've set the "URL Parameters" to no effect too. Also built a sitemap with all the lots in, pushed to Google which then crawled them all (massive spike in Crawl rate for a couple days), and still just indexing a handful of pages. Any clues to look into would be greatly appreciated. https://www.wilkinsons-auctioneers.co.uk/auctions/
Technical SEO | | Blue-shark0 -
Http VS https and google crawl and indexing ?
Is it true that https pages are not crawled and indexed by Google and other search engines as well as http pages?
Technical SEO | | sherohass0 -
Instant Indexing
I've been working on a site for a while now, methodically building content and building trust and authority. Lately I've noticed that anything I publish there appears to be instantly indexed by Google, which surprises me. I haven't had this happen before so I'm curious. I'd be interested to hear the experience of others.
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Can JavaScrip affect Google's index/ranking?
We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop? I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... " One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website. All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website. Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!
Technical SEO | | echo10 -
Google is indexing proxy (mirror) site.
We moved the site to a new hosting. Previously the site used Godaddy Windows Hosting with white domain masking. After moving the site we just mirrored the site. We have to use mirrored domain for PPC campaigns because it mirrored site contains true BRAND name and there is better conversion with that domain plus all trade marked keywords are approved for mirrored domain. Robots.txt User-agent: * Host: www.hermitagejewelers.com Disallow: /Bin Disallow: /css www.hermitagejewelers.com is the main domain. Mirror site is www.ermitagejewelers.com (Without the "H" at the beginning) Most of the keywords are now picked up by mirror site. I have not noticed any major changes in ranking except that it ranks for mirror site. We updated the sitemap. Website is designed very poorly (not by us). Also, we submitted the change address request for ermitagejewelers to hermitagejewelers in webmasters. Please let me know any advice to fix that problem. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | MaxRuso1 -
We changed the URL structure 10 weeks ago and Google hasn't indexed it yet...
We recently modified the whole URL structure on our website, which resulted in huge amount of 404 pages changing them to nice human readable urls. We did this in the middle of March - about 10 weeks ago... We used to have around 5000 404 pages in the beginning, but this number is decreasing slowly. (We have around 3000 now). On some parts of the website we have also set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, to avoid showing a 404 page thus making the “indexing transmission”, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. We've lost a significant amount of traffic, because of the URL changes, as Google removed the old URLs, but hasn’t indexed our new URLs yet. Is there anything else we can do to get our website indexed with the new URL structure quicker? It might also be useful to know that we are a page rank 4 and have over 30,000 unique users a month so I am sure Google often comes to the site quite often and pages we have made since then that only have the new url structure are indexed within hours sometimes they appear in search the next day!
Technical SEO | | jack860
