Hey Guys,

We’re in the process of transitioning our key traffic generating pages on our website from m. to responsive.

Today, our site uses Google’s ‘Separate URLs’ method.

• Rel alternate on desktop pages to m. pages
• 302 redirects pushing mobile visitors to m. pages
• Canonical on m. pages back to desktop pages

As we make the transition to responsive we’ll be taking the following steps:

• Removal of 302 redirects pushing mobile visitors to m. pages
• 301 redirects from m. pages to desktop pages

With those changes in mind, I’d love to get the communities opinion on how to best handle the real alternate attribute on desktop pages.

I'm considering leaving the rel alternate attribute in place on desktop pages for 30-90 days so that search engines continue to see the alternate version without the 302 redirects in place, crawl it, and as a result discover the 301 redirects more readily.

If we remove the 302 redirects as well as the rel alternate, then my feeling is that search engines would just index the responsive page accordingly and be less likely to catch the 301 redirects pointing from the m. pages and make the transition of mobile pages in search indices take longer than necessary.

Ultimately, I'm probably splitting hairs and getting a bit nuanced because I believe things will work themselves out whether we leave the rel alternate or remove it but I thought it would be great to get any opinions or thoughts from community members that have made a similar transition.

Thanks in advance for stopping by and providing your thoughts.

All the best,
Jon

PS - for your reference, the only mention that I was able to dig up in Q&A for a move from m. to responsive are the following:

• Redirecting M Dot Mobile Website to Responsive Design Website Questions
• SEO Concerns From Moving Mobile M Dot site to Responsive Version?

Hey Guys,

Thanks for taking the time to respond!

@ruth that's awesome Looking forward to it.

Jon

Hey Guys,

This has been on my mind ever since the big announcement, so today I did some searching around for some posts/talk about what the impact of their full site redirect has been for them and didn't find anything.

Have they posted on this or are there any threads that I'm missing out on? I'd love to hear more about what the impact has been or any general thoughts/insights people may have.

Thanks!
Jon

Thanks for the responses guys!

Are either of you aware of whether or not Google would ever index a page if someone searched for it? For example, say someone did a Google search for the URL I specified above. Would Google ever get curious and then try and crawl it?

Thanks again for taking the time to help out

Hey Guys,

I'm curious if there are ways a page can get indexed even if the page isn't linked to or hasn't been submitted to a search engine.

To my knowledge the following page on our website is not linked to and we definitely didn't submit it to Google - but it's currently indexed:

<cite>takelessons.com/admin.php/adminJobPosition/corp</cite>

Anyone have any ideas as to why or how this could have happened? Hopefully I'm missing something obvious

Thanks,

Jon

Hey Gustav, thanks for the response. As a quick follow up for clarity on my end. Here's an example of what I was referring to using the SEOmoz home page as an example again. Would it be okay from your perspective to do the following?

SEOmoz Pro combines campaign-based monitoring, actionable recommendations, and premium access to the web's largest

SEO community

• try it free for 30 days.

Again, assuming that primary keyword for SEOmoz is "seo community." To me this is an effort to try and fool Google into thinking that SEO community is your top-level heading when in reality it's just a section of a sentence. Would you agree?

Typically H1 tags are reserved for page headings, i.e. on a blog post the blog post title is very often the pages H1, or top-level heading as the W3C puts it.

On the SEOmoz home page they currently have "SEO Software." as their H1 tag, which seems perfectly reasonable and to me fits the W3C criteria.

However, what if the primary keyword for SEOmoz was "seo community" so they decided to wrap just those two words in the sentence that follows on their home page and maintain the existing style of the words "seo community" with CSS. (see attachment)

Are there any arguments against doing that?

Would Google be able to detect this? If so, would Google care?

I do believe the overall importance of the H1 tag has lessened to a degree, however I still believe they are valuable to an extent and would love to hear anyone's thoughts.

7NZcD.png

Hey Steve,

As Ryan mentioned the keyword meta tag is no longer used for ranking purposes. Here's a great Google Webmaster Post and video with Mat Cutts that covers this topic.

As for your keywords I would stick to 2 or 3 per page so that the page is targeted and tightly themed. If you try to optimize your pages for too many keywords the content will likely start to become diluted and less valuable from a search engines perspective. To answer your second question more directly it would be ideal to have individual pages that target a single keyword, however I would only recommend this if you have quality content to support each of the keywords. Otherwise, your pages will have a difficult time ranking.

Something to note is that a few of your keywords are multi-purpose. In other words, if you optimize one of your pages for "digital aerials stockport" you will naturally be optimizing for "aerials stockport" as this keyword is contained within "digital aerials stockport." Just something to think about

If you're looking for some tips on keyword research check out this section of the SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO.

Hopefully this helps - good luck!

Typically H1 tags are reserved for page headings, i.e. on a blog post the blog post title is very often the pages H1, or top-level heading as the W3C puts it.

On the SEOmoz home page they currently have "SEO Software." as their H1 tag, which seems perfectly reasonable and to me fits the W3C criteria.

However, what if the primary keyword for SEOmoz was "seo community" so they decided to wrap just those two words in the sentence that follows on their home page and maintain the existing style of the words "seo community" with CSS. (see attachment)

Are there any arguments against doing that?

Would Google be able to detect this? If so, would Google care?

I do believe the overall importance of the H1 tag has lessened to a degree, however I still believe they are valuable to an extent and would love to hear anyone's thoughts.

7NZcD.png

Hey Steve,

As Ryan mentioned the keyword meta tag is no longer used for ranking purposes. Here's a great Google Webmaster Post and video with Mat Cutts that covers this topic.

As for your keywords I would stick to 2 or 3 per page so that the page is targeted and tightly themed. If you try to optimize your pages for too many keywords the content will likely start to become diluted and less valuable from a search engines perspective. To answer your second question more directly it would be ideal to have individual pages that target a single keyword, however I would only recommend this if you have quality content to support each of the keywords. Otherwise, your pages will have a difficult time ranking.

Something to note is that a few of your keywords are multi-purpose. In other words, if you optimize one of your pages for "digital aerials stockport" you will naturally be optimizing for "aerials stockport" as this keyword is contained within "digital aerials stockport." Just something to think about

If you're looking for some tips on keyword research check out this section of the SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO.

Hopefully this helps - good luck!

Hey Guys,

This has been on my mind ever since the big announcement, so today I did some searching around for some posts/talk about what the impact of their full site redirect has been for them and didn't find anything.

Have they posted on this or are there any threads that I'm missing out on? I'd love to hear more about what the impact has been or any general thoughts/insights people may have.

Thanks!
Jon