Mobile URLs in the desktop SERPs
-
Our real estate website URL is listed on desktop search as well as the mobile URL. I've read several blogposts on this subject but I still don't understand the fix for this. I've read to use rel=canonical tags. But does that stop Google from listing it in the desktop SERP? Is there a way to stop this without blocking the mobile site which is what our programmer wants to do? Or is this something we have to live with until Google fixes this issue?
-
Hi Melissa,
To avoid your Mobile URLs to get indexed on the desktop results you need to:
- Add rel=canonical annotations in each Mobile URL pointing to their desktop URL versions
- Add rel=alternate annotations in each Desktop URL pointing to their mobile URL versions
As Google specifies here and you can see in this graphic. Additionally, you can also see in those Google recommendations how you need to set 301 redirects to refer between your mobile and desktop URLs according to the user agent (mobile or desktop) used, as you can see in this other graphic too.
If you look to optimize more your site towards Mobile SEO, you can also take a look at this Moz post I wrote some months ago.
Thanks!
-
Hi Melissa,
If I read your question correctly, you've run into a situation where your mobile URLs for your mobile website are appearing in desktop searches? Do you have a sitemap on your mobile website that is properly formatted for mobile websites? That's a strong indication that your website is in fact a mobile website and should not appear in desktop search results, only mobile search results.
Here's a great resource on mobile sitemaps: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34648
Hope that helps.
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
-
Why Dropping pages from SERPS?
Our website for my olansi company in London, China has hundreds of pages dedicated to every service we provide to China local areas. The total number of pages is approximately 100. Google caters pretty well for long-tail searches when it indexes all these pages, so we usually get a fair amount of traffic when this happens. However, Google occasionally drops most of our indexed pages from search engine results for a few days or weeks at a time - for example, Google is currently indexing 60 pages while last week it was back at 100. Can you tell me why this happens? When these pages don't display, we lose a lot of organic traffic. What are we doing wrong? Site url:https://www.olanside.com
Technical SEO | | sesahoda0 -
Which URL is better?
Hi everyone, Could you please help me with picking out the right URL for my company's website? We are MoonCreate and we make beautiful clothes. Unfortunately, the domain mooncreate.com is not available and I have to choose between mooncreatebrand.com or mooncreatewear.com Which one is better, in your opinion? Look forward to receive your suggestions! Thank you! 🙂
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Goolge: Mobile friendliness is now a ranking factor on Mobile
John Mueller from Google has just confirmed: Google has just confirmed that mobile friendliness is now a ranking factor for people on smartphones. The date it goes live is 24th April 2015. There is a great presentation on the hangout - which will be available later to watch and once its available I will update with a link - but I would make sure your checking webmaster tools for any alerts / messages if you care about smartphone users. What do people recommend, regarding responsive vs mobile site vs dynamic serving. Is your site ready? What are you planning on doing since the update has been announced.
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday1 -
Question about creating friendly URLs
I am working on creating new SEO friendly URLs for my company website. The products are the items with the highest search volume and each is very geo-specific
Technical SEO | | theLotter
There is not a high search volume for the geo-location associated with the product, but the searches we do get convert well. Do you think it is preferable to leave the location out of the URL or include it?0 -
Https Version of Homepage in SERPS
The https version of our homepage appears in Google's SERPs. We have rel canonical on the page pointing to the http version. We have a redirect in our htaccess that sends https to http. I thought this was just a fluke and it would be fixed by the next crawl, but it's been like this for a few weeks now. Not only that, but we're losing rank a bit and I'm afraid there's a correlation. Has this ever happened to anyone?
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
/out/ URLs in GWMTs
I am recently seeing some URLs come up as 404s in GWMTs for a client. They look like this: http://client-url/out/www.linkedin.com/company/client-linkedin-name /out/client-url/sub-directory/postname/ We thought they might have something to do with the social plugins but they are all over the place and they are sometime for internal pages on the site. Anyone run into these and know why they are happening?
Technical SEO | | DragonSearch0 -
URL rewriting from subcategory to category
Hello everybody! I have quite simple question about URL rewriting from subcategory to category, yet I can't find any solution to this problem (due to lack of my deeper apache programming knowledge). Here is my problem/question: we have two website url structures that causes dublicate problems: www.website.lt/language/category/ www.website.lt/language/category/1/ 1 and 2 pages are absolutely same (both also returns 200 OK). What we need is 301 redirect from 2 to 1 without any other deeper categories redirects (like www.website.com/language/category/1/169/ redirecting to .../category/1/ or .../category/). Here goes .htaccess URL rewrite rules: RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&par4=$6&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/$ /index.php?lang=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] There are other redirects that handles non-www to www and related issues: RedirectMatch 301 ^/lt/$ http://www.domain.lt/ RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.lt RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.lt/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.domain.lt/$1/ [R=301,L] At this moment we cannot solve this problem with rel canonical (due to our CMS limits). Thanks for your help guys! If You need any other details on our coding, just let me know.
Technical SEO | | jkundrotas0 -
Slashes In Url's
If your cms has created two urls for the same piece of content that look like the following, www.domianname.com/stores and www.domianname.com/stores/, will this be seen as duplicate content by google? Your tools seem to pick it up as errors. Does one of the urls need 301 to the other to clear this up, or is it not a major problem? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | gregster10000