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
-
How do we decide which pages to index/de-index? Help for a 250k page site
At Siftery (siftery.com) we have about 250k pages, most of them reflected in our sitemap. Though after submitting a sitemap we started seeing an increase in the number of pages Google indexed, in the past few weeks progress has slowed to a crawl at about 80k pages, and in fact has been coming down very marginally. Due to the nature of the site, a lot of the pages on the site likely look very similar to search engines. We've also broken down our sitemap into an index, so we know that most of the indexation problems are coming from a particular type of page (company profiles). Given these facts below, what do you recommend we do? Should we de-index all of the pages that are not being picked up by the Google index (and are therefore likely seen as low quality)? There seems to be a school of thought that de-indexing "thin" pages improves the ranking potential of the indexed pages. We have plans for enriching and differentiating the pages that are being picked up as thin (Moz itself picks them up as 'duplicate' pages even though they're not. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggiaco-siftery0 -
Sitemap: unique sitemap or different sitemaps by Country
Hi guys, i have a question about sitemaps. We are doing an international site, e.x. www.offers.com for landing page and www.offers.com/br for brazil, www.offers.com/it for italy, etc... i don't if we should do an unique sitemap for all countries or separate sitemaps by country, e.x.: unique sitemap: www.offers.com/sitemap.xml - including all sitemaps www.offers.com/br/sitemap.xml - sitemap for brazil market only. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thekiller990 -
Google is indexing wrong page for search terms not on that page
I’m having a problem … the wrong page is indexing with Google, for search phrases “not on that page”. Explained … On a website I developed, I have four products. For example sake, we’ll say these four products are: Sneakers (search phrase: sneakers) Boots (search phrase: boots) Sandals (search phrase: sandals) High heels (search phrase: high heels) Error: What is going “wrong” is … When the search phrase “high heels” is indexed by Google, my “Sneakers” page is being indexed instead (and ranking very well, like #2). The page that SHOULD be indexing, is the “High heels” page (not the sneakers page – this is the wrong search phrase, and it’s not even on that product page – not in URL, not in H1 tags, not in title, not in page text – nowhere, except for in the top navigation link). Clue #1 … this same error is ALSO happening for my other search phrases, in exactly the same manner. i.e. … the search phrase “sandals” is ALSO resulting in my “Sneakers” page being indexed, by Google. Clue #2 … this error is NOT happening with Bing (the proper pages are correctly indexing with the proper search phrases, in Bing). Note 1: MOZ has given all my product pages an “A” ranking, for optimization. Note 2: This is a WordPress website. Note 3: I had recently migrated (3 months ago) most of this new website’s page content (but not the “Sneakers” page – this page is new) from an old, existing website (not mine), which had been indexing OK for these search phrases. Note 4: 301 redirects were used, for all of the OLD website pages, to the new website. I have tried everything I can think of to fix this, over a period of more than 30 days. Nothing has worked. I think the “clues” (it indexes properly in Bing) are useful, but I need help. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MG_Lomb_SEO0 -
Best to Fix Duplicate Content Issues on Blog If URLs are Set to "No-Index"
Greetings Moz Community: I purchased a SEMrush subscription recently and used it to run a site audit. The audit detected 168 duplicate content issues mostly relating to blog posts tags. I suspect these issues may be due to canonical tags not being set up correctly. My developer claims that since these blog URLs are set to "no-index" these issues do not need to be corrected. My instinct would be to avoid any risk with potential duplicate content. To set up canonicalization correctly. In addition, even if these pages are set to "no-index" they are passing page rank. Further more I don't know why a reputable company like SEMrush would consider these errors if in fact they are not errors. So my question is, do we need to do anything with the error pages if they are already set to "no-index"? Incidentally the site URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. I am attaching a copy of the SEMrush audit. Thanks, Alan BarjWaO SqVXYMy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Why extreme drop in number of pages indexed via GWMT sitemaps?
Any tips on why our GWMT Sitemaps indexed pages dropped to 27% of total submitted entries (2290 pages submitted, 622 indexed)? Already checked the obvious Test Sitemap, valid URLs etc. We had typically been at 95% of submitted getting indexed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jkinnisch0 -
Urls missing from product_cat sitemap
I'm using Yoast SEO plugin to generate XML sitemaps on my e-commerce site (woocommerce). I recently changed the category structure and now only 25 of about 75 product categories are included. Is there a way to manually include urls or what is the best way to have them all indexed in the sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kisen0 -
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 -
Best way to permanently remove URLs from the Google index?
We have several subdomains we use for testing applications. Even if we block with robots.txt, these subdomains still appear to get indexed (though they show as blocked by robots.txt. I've claimed these subdomains and requested permanent removal, but it appears that after a certain time period (6 months)? Google will re-index (and mark them as blocked by robots.txt). What is the best way to permanently remove these from the index? We can't use login to block because our clients want to be able to view these applications without needing to login. What is the next best solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0