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
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.
-
Hey Paul
Did you get any response after tweeting Google? Thx.
-
Paul
That was an excellent response. I also appreciate you going out of your way to hit up Google directly about this as well.Yes we believe that this it is completely unnecessary to employ valuable resources to resolve a very minor issue. However our client would is going to ask us to back our argument.
Thanks again
-
As usual, Mueller's answers can be problematic because they're actually kind of vague. (e.g. his use of "if you use one of the other methods, make sure to follow those instructions separately" in that seroundtable article) Because the question asked in that article is specifically about responsive sites, non m. separate URL versions.
Here's the best I can give you... On that guidelines page you ,inked, Google specifically provides instructions for how to either include the mobile-URL versions of pages in the rel-alternate tag or by annotating the desktop sitemap to include rel-alternate info for the mobile URLS.
It does not make any mention of saying "or you can simply include the mobile URLs in the sitemap as well." Google's usually pretty good about telling us when there is more than one alternate method, while indicating which one they prefer. in this vase, I have to assume the conspicuous absence of any mention of including mobile URLs separately means it shouldn't be done.
Still conjecture, but does that make sense?
I'd definitely say it's imperative that the rel-alternate/rel-canonical treatment must be in place. Beyond that, I suspect it's a crawl budget/crawl efficiency issue, not an actual "indexing will break if mobile URLs are in sitemap" situation. As such, I wouldn't want to prioritise an expensive solution to this over whatever other more high-impact projects might be awaiting funding.
Just for the hell of it, I'll tweet at the Google guys to see if I can get a direct response to "will it cause harm" and let you know if I hear back.
I know this is just another perspective, not anything definitive, but hope it helps?
Paul
-
-
Thanks Thomas. The challenge we have is providing our client with a reputable source (not saying your not credible..lol) that states this is a negligible issue.
-
I don't believe that having the mobile urls in the sitemap is causing any issue. Due to the fact that these urls presumably can be crawled anyway on the mobile subdomain. I can't see any negative for having these urls on a sitemap.
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
-
Should I use noindex or robots to remove pages from the Google index?
I have a Magento site and just realized we have about 800 review pages indexed. The /review directory is disallowed in robots.txt but the pages are still indexed. From my understanding robots means it will not crawl the pages BUT if the pages are still indexed if they are linked from somewhere else. I can add the noindex tag to the review pages but they wont be crawled. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-do-not-use-noindex-in-robots-txt-20873.html Should I remove the robots.txt and add the noindex? Or just add the noindex to what I already have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Building a product clients will integrate into their sites: What is the best way to utilize my clients' unique domain names?
I'm designing a hosted product my clients will integrate into their websites, their end users would access it via my clients' customer-facing websites. It is a product my clients pay for which provides a service to their end users, who would have to login to my product via a link provided by my clients. Most clients would choose to incorporate this link prominently on their home page and site nav.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emzeegee
All clients will be in the same vertical market, so their sites will be keyword rich and related to my site.
Many may even be .org and ,edus The way I see it, there are three main ways I could set this up within the product.
I want to know which is most beneficial, or if I'm missing anything. 1: They set up a subdomain at their domain that serves content from my domain product.theirdomain.com would render content from mydomain.com's database.
product.theirdomain.com could have footer and/or other no-follow links to mydomain.com with target keywords The risk I see here is having hundreds of sites with the same target keyword linking back to my domain.
This may be the worst option, as I'm not sure about if the nofollow will help, because I know Google considers this kind of link to be a link scheme: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en 2: They link to a subdomain on mydomain.com from their nav/site
Their nav would include an actual link to product.mydomain.com/theircompanyname
Each client would have a different "theircompanyname" link.
They would decide and/or create their link method (graphic, presence of alt tag, text, what text, etc).
I would have no control aside from requiring them to link to that url on my server. 3: They link to a subdirectory on mydomain.com from their nav/site
Their nav would include an actual link to mydomain.com/product/theircompanyname
Each client would have a different "theircompanyname" link.
They would decide and/or create their link method (graphic, presence of alt tag, text, what text, etc).
I would have no control aside from requiring them to link to that url on my server. In all scenarios, my marketing content would be set up around mydomain.com both as static content and a blog directory, all with SEO attractive url slugs. I'm leaning towards option 3, but would like input!0 -
URL Index Removal for Hacked Website - Will this help?
My main question is: How do we remove URLs (links) from Google's index and the 1000s of created 404 errors associated with them after a website was hacked (and now fixed)? The story: A customer came to us for a new website and some SEO. They had an existing website that had been hacked and their previous vendor was non-responsive to address the issue for months. This created THOUSANDS of URLs on their website that were then linked to pornographic and prescription med SPAM sites. Now, Google has 1,205 pages indexed that create 404 errors on the new site. I am confident these links are causing Google to not rank well organically. Additional information: Entirely new website Wordpress site New host Should we be using the "Remove URLs" tool from Google to submit all 1205 of these pages? Do you think it will make a difference? This is down from the 22,500 URLs that existed when we started a few months back. Thank you in advance for any tips or suggestions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tosten0 -
301 vs 410 redirect: What to use when removing a URL from the website
We are in the process of detemining how to handle URLs that are completely removed from our website? Think of these as listings that have an expiration date (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/test-prep/tphU3/sat-group-course). What is the best practice for removing these listings (assuming not many people are linking to them externally). 301 to a general page (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/search/test-prep) Do nothing and leave them up but remove from the site map (as they are no longer useful from a user perspective) return a 404 or 410?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abargmann0 -
Google is Really Slow to Index my New Website
(Sorry for my english!) A quick background: I had a website at thewebhostinghero.com which had been slapped left and right by Google (both Panda & Penguin). It also had a manual penalty for unnatural links which had been lifted in late april / early may this year. I also had another domain, webhostinghero.com, which was redirecting to thewebhostinghero.com. When I realized I would be better off starting a new website than trying to salvage thewebhostinghero.com, I removed the redirection from webhostinghero.com and started building a new website. I waited about 5 or 6 weeks before putting any content on webhostinghero.com so Google had time to notice that the domain wasn't redirecting anymore. So about a month ago, I launched http://www.webhostinghero.com with 100% new content but I left thewebhostinghero.com online because it still brings a little (necessary) income. There are no links between the websites except on one page (www.thewebhostinghero.com/speed/) which is set to "noindex,nofollow" and is disallowed to search engines in robots.txt. I made sure the web page was deindexed before adding a "nofollow" link from thewebhostinghero.com/speed => webhostinghero.com/speed Since the new website launch, I've been publishing new content (from 2 to 5 posts) daily. It's getting some traction from social networks but it gets barely any clicks from Google search. It seems to take at least a week before Google indexes new posts and not all posts are indexed. The cached copy of the homepage is 12 days old. In Google Webmaster Tools, it looks like Google isn't getting the latest sitemap version unless I resubmit it manually. It's always 4 or 5 days old. So is my website just too young or could it have some kind of penalty related to the old website? The domain has 4 or 5 really old spammy links from the previous domain owner which I couldn't get rid of but otherwise I don't think there's anything tragic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Indexing falling/search queries the same - concerned
Hello, I posted abou this a few days ago but didn't really get anywhere and now have new information after looking into it more. This is my site - http://www.whosjack.org My page indexing has been falling steadily daily currently from thousands of pages indexed to just a couple of hundred. My search queries don't seem to be currently affected, I have done crawl tests to see if the site can be crawled and put the site:whosjack.org into Google and had 12,000 results come back when goole has said it has indexed 133 and falling. However all pages indexed on the site:whosjack.org search seem to be stories with just two words in the title? I am sure I am missing out on traffic here but can't work out what the issue is and how to fix it. I have no alerts on my dashboard and when I submit sitemaps to webmaster tools I get 15,115 URLs submitted 12,088 URLs indexedwhich cant be bad?Any help/suggestions really appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luwhosjack0 -
Is it ok to add rel=CANONICAL into the desktop version on top of the rel="alternate" Tag (Mobile vs Desktop version)
Hi mozzers, We launched a mobile site a couples months ago following the parallel mobile structure with a URL:m.example.com The week later my moz crawl detected thousands of dups which I resolved by implementing canonical tags on the mobile version and rel=alternate onto the desktop version. The problem here is that I still also got Dups from that got generated by the CMS. ?device=mobile ?device=desktop One of the options to resolve those is to add canonicals on the desktop versions as well on top of the rel=alternate tag we just implemented. So my question here: is it dangerous to add rel=canonical and rel=alternate tags on the desktop version of the site or not? will it disrupt the rel=canonical on mobile? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Mobile Site - Same Content, Same subdomain, Different URL - Duplicate Content?
I'm trying to determine the best way to handle my mobile commerce site. I have a desktop version and a mobile version using a 3rd party product called CS-Cart. Let's say I have a product page. The URLs are... mobile:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon
store.domain.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.catalog#products.view&product_id=857 desktop:
store.domain.com/two-toned-tee.html I've been trying to get information regarding how to handle mobile sites with different URLs in regards to duplicate content. However, most of these results have the assumption that the different URL means m.domain.com rather than the same subdomain with a different address. I am leaning towards using a canonical URL, if possible, on the mobile store pages. I see quite a few suggesting to not do this, but again, I believe it's because they assume we are just talking about m.domain.com vs www.domain.com. Any additional thoughts on this would be great!0