Desktop & Mobile Sitemaps Covering The Same Ground - Any Benefit To Having Both?
-
If my URL structure is the same for the desktop and mobile experience, is there any benefit to creating a mobile sitemap, considering that the sitemap for our desktop site covers the same URLs?
-
Yes, it's responsive design with the exact same URLs for both mobile and desktop.
Thanks for your helpful response!
-
Hi John,
When you say that the URLs have the same structure: do you mean that they are different URLs but organised the same way (e.g. www.domain.com is the same as m.domain.com, www.domain.com/page-1 is the sames as m.domain.com/page-1, etc)? Or is it a responsive site with the same URLs regardless of device?
The primary benefit of a sitemap is for discovery by the search engine crawlers. If you have a responsive site, you don't need a separate mobile sitemap. If you have a different set of URLs for mobile devices, even if it follows the same structure as the desktop site, I'd recommend creating a mobile sitemap.
Hope that helps!
-
John,
Yes! In search marketing today everything is about an edge. Anything you can do to make it easier for search engines to quantify that giving your company as a result is better increases the possibility that you get a higher ranking. Well over 50% of search is on mobile devices today so serving this traffic well is a priority. You should also take some time to look at your menu on mobile devices to see if they are organized in a way that would be convenient for a mobile user. I would highly recommend getting a smart phone with a smaller screen to make sure the buttons are convenient to use. Although these UI adjustments don't directly affect your rankings they do effect your user engagement which in turn decreases your bounce rate and improves your conversion rate. This in turn is factored into your rankings.
Going back to my first argument I would recommend that If you have video or audio that you submit site maps for these as well.
Hope this helps,
Ron
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
-
AMP Benefits
Hello, Does AMP have ranking benefits ? Should I just AMP my post or all the pages of my website, product page, homepage etc... Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
For a sitemap.html page, does the URL slug have to be /sitemap?
Also, do you have to have anchors in your sitemap.html? or are naked URLs that link okay?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imjonny1230 -
Pagination & SEO
Hi We have automatically created brand pages based on which brand they have in their attributes. At the moment, developers have restricted the ability to properly optimise these for SEO, but I also wanted to look at how we should handle pagination. Example: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/manutan?page=1 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/manutan?page=2 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/manutan?page=3 Should we do any of the following - which I've found in an article: Put no follow on all links located on pagination pages Should we no index these pages as they are wasting crawl budget? - Don’t show links to page 2, 3, 4, 5… 10, 11, 12… at the end of your content but only a link to the next and previous pages so that you won’t dilute your page authority. Or does anyone else have any tips on how to handle these pages? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Can't generate a sitemap with all my pages
I am trying to generate a site map for my site nationalcurrencyvalues.com but all the tools I have tried don't get all my 70000 html pages... I have found that the one at check-domains.com crawls all my pages but when it writes the xml file most of them are gone... seemingly randomly. I have used this same site before and it worked without a problem. Can anyone help me understand why this is or point me to a utility that will map all of the pages? Kindly, Greg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Banknotes0 -
2015/2016 Sitemaps Exclusions
Hello fellow mozrs!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | artdivision
Been working on a few Property (Real Estate for our American friends) websites recently and and two questions that constantly come up as we spec the site are: 1. What schema (schema.org) should the website use (throughout all pages as well as individual pages). Did anyone found that schema actually helped with their ranking/CTR?
2. Whilst setting up the sitemaps (usually Yaost is our preferred plugin for the job), what page would you EXCLUDE from the site map? Looking forward to some interesting comments.
Dan.0 -
Https & http urls in Google Index
Hi everyone, this question is a two parter: I am now working for a large website - over 500k monthly organic traffic. The site currently has both http and https urls in Google's index. The website has not formally converted to https. The https began with an error and has evolved unchecked over time. Both versions of the site (http & https) are registered in webmaster tools so I can clearly track and see that as time passes http indexation is decreasing and https has been increasing. The ratio is at about 3:1 in favor of https at this time. Traffic over the last year has slowly dipped, however, over the last two months there has been a steady decline in overall visits registered through analytics. No single page appears to be the culprit, this decline is occurring across most pages of the website, pages which traditionally draw heavy traffic - including the home page. Considering that Google is giving priority to https pages, could it be possible that the split is having a negative impact on traffic as rankings sway? Additionally, mobile activity for the site has steadily increased both from a traffic and a conversion standpoint. However that traffic has also dipped significantly over the last two months. Looking at Google's mobile usability error's page I see a significant number of errors (over 1k). I know Google has been testing and changing mobile ranking factors, is it safe to posit that this could be having an impact on mobile traffic? The traffic declines are 9-10% MOM. Thank you. ~Geo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Geosem0 -
Custom sitemap or sitemap generator tool
I have recently launched a website which is using a free sitemap generator (http://web-site-map.com/). It's a large travel agency site (www.yougoadventure.com) with predominantly dynamically generated content - users can add their products as and when and be listed automatically. The guy doing the programming for the site says the sitemap generator is not up to the job and that I should be ranking far better for certain search terms than the site is now. He reckons it doesn't provide lastmod info and the sitemap should be submitted every time a new directory is added or change made. He seems to think that I need to spend £400-£500 for him to custom build a site map. Surely there's a cheaper option out there for a sitemap that can be generated daily or 'ping' google every-time an addition to the site is made or product added? Sorry for the non tech speak - Ive got my web designer telling one thing and the programmer another so im just left trawling through Q&As. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Curran0 -
Sitemap in SERPS
What's up guys, Having some troubles with SERP rankings. My sitemap (navigation) is appearing instead of my actual keywords. I have tried a few methods to fix this; setting a preferred domain, using a 301 redirects, deleting out of date pages via Google webmaster tools. Nothing seems to work. My next step was to refresh the cache for my entire site - does anyone know how to do this? Can't see any tools... Any help would be great. Cheers, Jon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesjk240