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Hi JH,

Typically, collapsing lengthier content on a mobile site (with an option to expand/view the content if desired) in order to improve UX is not considered an issue for Google. However, anytime you're using JS, there's a risk that search engine crawlers won't be able to see what you're doing. You may want to test with JS disabled in your browser to get an idea of what they might be seeing otherwise.

What is the reason for the length of the content at the top of the page? Are you creating that content for users or for search engines? I'm guessing it's not really for users if you're auto-scrolling them past it? This is often something that Google can spot and discount the value of.

I would probably recommend (if possible) a "collapse and expand" approach to lengthy content at the top of the page, rather than autoscrolling down to the products. Show the beginning of that content and offer a "click to expand" if users want to read the full text. You could use JS for that expand and default a non-JS experience to simply display the full content, to ensure that search engines do see the full text. Or if the content includes images, consider removing the images or shrinking them for the mobile version of the site. You may also want to test shortening the length of the content on some of your pages and see whether this impacts performance in one direction or the other.

Hope that helps!

From my understanding of mobile-first indexing, your mobile site will become the primary version Google crawlers see when they are looking at your website. So in terms of the impact of hiding the breadcrumbs on your mobile site, Google will see that you've hidden them and may or may not see them on the desktop version because they may or may not bother to crawl the desktop version.

My question to you would be - what value are you seeing from the breadcrumbs on desktop? Can you check your analytics data to see whether users are using these breadcrumbs for navigation? Do you mark up your breadcrumbs with schema to allow them to show up in rich snippets? If the breadcrumbs do not currently add much value to your users and if they don't serve an SEO purpose, you may not need to bother including them on mobile. On the other hand, if you know that they add to a better UX, you may see a benefit from adding them to the mobile version of the site. This is because Google likes to reward sites with a better UX for mobile users. If you are using them more for search engines to have easier crawl access, I would suggest revisiting your site structure more broadly to ensure that no important page is further than 3-4 clicks from the homepage; and/or ensure that you keep your sitemaps up to date with all important pages and submit in GSC and BWT.

So glad if it's useful!

Hi Rajesh,

Based on what you've described, it sounds like a desktop PWA could be a good way to go! But I would avoid hiding any content from Google crawlers. Instead, check out these articles for some guidelines on how to optimize a PWA site for SEO:

• https://moz.com/blog/introducing-progressive-web-apps
• https://searchengineland.com/google-progressive-web-apps-mobile-experience-seo-259866
• https://www.keylimetoolbox.com/news/technical-seo-progressive-web-apps-pwa-javascript-ajax/

Also, be aware that PWAs are not supported by all browsers, so before you go forward with that approach and ditch a regular website, make sure you look into what browsers your customers are using and ensure that all browsers which are used by a significant percentage of your audience have a supported experience. Hope this helps!

Great question! I love also that you're thinking about how to give support to your clients beyond just answering their literal question -- you're absolutely right that a lot of people are just feeling a bit of anxiety around being "not ready".

My typical response would be very similar to the points you've outlined, and I typically try to offer reassurance that this change isn't necessarily as drastic as it sounds as long as you already have a functional mobile-friendly version of your website. I suspect that part of the question comes from the issue of what Google views as "ready" to migrate versus what the webmaster might feel they need to do before they feel "ready". But as long as your mobile version is performing well and you have all the content accessible and user friendly, I don't think there's a lot to worry about.

I wrote a post for the Moz blog earlier this year to answer some of the FAQs people have about the shift to mobile-first indexing, you might find it helpful either for your own answer to this question or as a resource to share with people who ask you about it: https://moz.com/blog/mobile-first-indexing-seo

Hi, as long as your website is properly optimized for mobile SEO (for instance, if you use dynamic serving for the images, make sure you include the Vary-HTTP header to let Google know that you're doing that) using the same descriptions etc across all versions shouldn't cause any issues. You can also feel free to optimize each version differently if you discover (for example) that users use different search terms when searching for images on a mobile device versus a desktop.

Bear in mind these are images, so you'll want to optimize for the image content, not the target keyword of the page that the image appears on.

Hope this helps!

Istvan has given some great advice here - one other thing I would add about the gibberish URLs though: especially with the format of these, it's possible that the site may have been the victim of a hack.

Make sure you get the site scanned for malware or other hacking activity and going forward have a security expert ensure that the site is secure (especially if it's using a platform like Wordpress which is vulnerable to hackers).

Roman has covered most of the bases with his answer, so I won't retread old ground! But one thing I will note - my understanding is that with mobile-first indexing, content which is default-collapsed (to minimize clutter) won't be discounted. So if there is content you want to have on the site but the long-form nature is making the mobile experience feel cluttered, consider including it in expandable accordion style sections or similar. I would not recommend leaving it out altogether as Googlebot may no longer crawl your desktop site at all and all that content you add to the desktop site only won't give you any benefit.

Hi Robin,

Nigel has offered some good advice here - the one thing I would also add is that you may want to set up mobile switchboard tags to make it clear to Google that the desktop version is the canonical version for PCs and the mobile version is canonical for mobile.

See more info here: https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/separate-urls#annotations-for-desktop-and-mobile-urls

Hi Taylor, great question! I think the first thing to remember is that AMP is something you want to implement alongside a mobile-friendly website, not as a replacement.

AMP pages by nature are faster than the typical webpage and so they should not be affected by this, according to Google's statement: "The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries." They also note that query intent is a very strong signal and so in theory a very slow but very relevant page could still outrank a faster, less relevant result.

My take on this update is that it is a sign of Google starting to focus on making the shift to mobile-first indexing. If you want more info on that, I wrote a blog post here on Moz about it recently: moz.com/blog/mobile-first-indexing-seo

It sounds like it may be a misattribution issue rather than an actual traffic loss. This article seems like it could provide a (partial) answer. Do the dates you saw the drop align with the dates mentioned in the article?

Hi Michelle,

You should use the 'switchboard tags', the special mobile canonical tag, when you have a mobile page which is a (duplicate) 'mobile version' of a desktop page.

This allows your mobile version to display in mobile search results, and your desktop version to display in desktop search results. It also indicates to Google that the mobile version is a duplicate version designed for mobile devices, rather than being simply duplicate content.

If you have a noindexed desktop page, and don't want the mobile version indexed either, you shouldn't need the canonical, just treat the mobile version the same as you would the desktop version.

If you have mobile-only content, with no corresponding desktop version, you can treat it the same as any other page; you don't need to add a canonical.

Hi,

This is a good question; for now my answer would be no, I wouldn't bother with rolling it out to non-news pages at the moment. Right now it's only for news/article pages, and if you do have any of that content on your site, it would certainly be worth rolling it out to those, but we don't know how it will play out.

Although it is likely that we could see it roll out further in the near future, for now I think you're best off simply improving other areas (including mobile-related things like mobile-friendliness of the UX and site speed) until we see what direction Google ends up taking this in.

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.

Hi Ruchy, I've answered your questions below:

1. Risks involved:

Most obvious is that you're duplicating your pages and therefore you'll need to make sure you correctly indicate that these are AMP versions of your regular content. There is also a risk that because the page loads in the search result, you'll see less traffic directly to your site - but usually (at least for publishers) this is worth it nonetheless because the impressions are higher (due to being featured in the news carousel at the top of the SERP).

2. the best ways to implement it:

Depends on your existing setup. If you have a custom CMS, get your dev team to build it into the next iteration of the CMS. If you use Wordpress, you can use a WP plugin - Yoast has a good post about this: https://yoast.com/wordpress-amp-part-ii/

3. why it is worth it:

It may not be. Definitely worthwhile for publishers or sites which publish content for Google News. For other types of site, I would recommend checking whether AMP is a common feature for your primary keywords, and decide accordingly. Also worth it if you're seeing a loss of general traffic and suspect it is due to AMP being more present in search. As James notes, it can help with pagespeed but that's not enough of a reason to do it.

4. Are there any specific questions I should ask a potential developer, or information he should be aware of?

Has he/she done this before? Can they provide working examples? Do they understand how to make sure it's showing up as AMP rather than purely duplicate content? Are they familiar with what elements are supported and unsupported? Are they able to also implement relevant structured data markup?

5. is there a way for it it be done for pages that have more than just text like quote forms, sliding headers etc.? Should we only do it for the blog section of our site?

You can add things like video, forms etc but bear in mind that the goal is to be as minimalist as possible, so any sort of fancy design element will likely not be supported. I would focus on implementing on news or other types of content which currently display AMP results in the SERP.

Great question! I love also that you're thinking about how to give support to your clients beyond just answering their literal question -- you're absolutely right that a lot of people are just feeling a bit of anxiety around being "not ready".

My typical response would be very similar to the points you've outlined, and I typically try to offer reassurance that this change isn't necessarily as drastic as it sounds as long as you already have a functional mobile-friendly version of your website. I suspect that part of the question comes from the issue of what Google views as "ready" to migrate versus what the webmaster might feel they need to do before they feel "ready". But as long as your mobile version is performing well and you have all the content accessible and user friendly, I don't think there's a lot to worry about.

I wrote a post for the Moz blog earlier this year to answer some of the FAQs people have about the shift to mobile-first indexing, you might find it helpful either for your own answer to this question or as a resource to share with people who ask you about it: https://moz.com/blog/mobile-first-indexing-seo

As far as I am aware, the association file is just about which paths the app can handle - I think that if you register the root domain and handle all paths then it will handle all paths across all sub-domains (but you should test this).

When you are actually linking individual web pages to the universal page in the app, it uses a fully-qualified URL with protocol and subdomain so should work fine (see this documentation).

Hi Peter,

What was your process for shifting to responsive, was it a migration? As in, did you have a separate mobile version which you then redirected to the newly-responsive www. version? A different URL structure which changed with the redesign? or did you simply have a non-mobile-friendly design of your site previously and you redesigned it to be responsive but kept all the URLs the same etc? If there was a migration involved, you may be seeing an impact from that.

Hi Ingolfur,

Are you still having this issue? I'm seeing AMP results when I search with a US IP on Google US and Google UK, but not seeing any AMP results in Google IS. I checked with both Chrome and Safari and saw the same thing though.

Hi bizzer,

Everyone should ideally have a mobile-friendly website, because the percentage of people accessing your site on mobile devices will only continue to increase. And if you already have a Wordpress site, switching to a responsive theme is a great way to achieve that. But...as you note, there are other considerations, such as potentially lost rankings.

Only you know how much of a drop you can afford. It's a short-term sacrifice for long-term results.

Generally speaking, my recommendation would always be that if you can possibly do it, you should. And Miki and Moosa made some good suggestions above for how to minimise the negative impact somewhat. Combined with good technical SEO going into the new source code, you should hopefully be able to regain your position fairly quickly.

To answer your follow-up question: we don't know for sure, but it seems likely that having a mobile-friendly website could be a quality factor, whether now or later. Google have certainly discussed best practice guidelines for mobile, which seems to indicate that a good mobile experience is something which they care about. Apart from anything else, ~60% of mobile users will bounce if they land on a non-mobile-friendly site and go to a competitor, so that in itself will send a negative signal if you have a significant amount of mobile traffic. (and 15-20% isn't too shabby - even if some of that is tablet traffic, a responsive design will provide a better experience for them as well).

Hope that helps!