SEO for mobile sites?
-
Let's say I have an ecommerce site and it has a separate theme via device detection. So I may even have different content on the pages. So for example, on desktop, on mysite.com/flowers I have a video about flowers. But on mobile, I have 10 000 words of text. Will this page rank better for people searching via mobile? Will google give different search rankings, based on desktop vs. mobile? Or how is Google calculating this? Are there any good mobile SEO tips or a knowhow base?
-
Hm, there are a lot of subtleties in here.
First, if you have mysite.com/flowers and m.mysite.com/flowers with completely different content on them, Google is not going to think they're the same page. They'll rank differently based on their own merits, and Google will probably rank _bot__h _of them for desktop and mobile. Google wants to give searchers access to all content across the web, so if you have two pages with different information, it'll show them as two resources.
Now, if you follow mobile best practices, you'll make m.mysite.com/flowers rel="canonical" to mysite.com/flowers, and rel="alternate" mysite.com/flowers to m.mysite.com/flowers. In that case, you're telling Google that mysite.com/flowers is the original source of information, and m.mysite.com/flowers is the same information presented differently. In that case, Google will only rank mysite.com/flowers for desktop searches and m.mysite.com/flowers for mobile searches. I'm not 100% sure how Google will handle the differing content in this case, but my guess is, it'll rank m.mysite.com/flowers as well as mysite.com/flowers would rank for the search, but it'll use the page title, URL, and meta description from m.mysite.com/flowers.
Like Andy said, Search Engine Land has a great guide to mobile SEO. I also wrote a guide that's more broadly about building a good mobile site and not just about SEO: https://www.distilled.net/training/mobile-seo-guide/
What's your real question behind all this? Are you building a mobile site and planning on making it significantly different than your desktop site? In that case, I'd recommend that you don't. If you have a video about flowers and 10,000 words of text on it, but both on your /flowers page and allow desktop and mobile visitors to access both. Generally, you want your mobile site experience to be as close as possible to the experience of browsing your desktop site. Otherwise, it's just confusing.
-
Matt,
On the mobile front simply focus on the users and UI.
On the SEO front, you just need to do the following -
- Place user agent specific redirects
- Place canonical tags on the mobile pages to the corresponding pages of desktop
This will ensure that you are not hit by duplicate content penalty and at the same time user experience is not hampered.
With the exception of local results, the search landscape on the organic front for mobiles as well as desktop is not majorly varied.
Hope this helps.
- Sajeet
-
Hi Jaan,
This is probably a good place to start. Loads of useful information about mobile SEO.
http://searchengineland.com/the-definitive-guide-to-mobile-technical-seo-166066
-Andy
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
-
Ecommerce - SEO Quick Wins?
Hi I wanted to find out if anyone had any quick wins for an ecommerce site & SEO. I am the only SEO and we have a small online team and an ecommerce site with thousands of product pages. It's impossible to optimise everything, and we have taken the top 100 products and optimised them - starting from scratch with keyword research. I'm now struggling to prioritize what we need next - I know we need better internal linking, content, social and lots more, but this isn't something I can get through alone. I need a starting point and perhaps something with a quick win initially? Thanks 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Site refuses to improve rankings. Can someone else put a set of eyes on this for me and see what I am missing?
Hello! We've been successful with over 40 clients and getting them to great results in our industry, insurance. We recently acquired a new client who had an existing website with prior SEO results a very spammy blog and many spammy links. We've removed many of the blog articles and links using the Google Disavow Tool We've been monitoring this site in a campaign on Moz, but we're seeing zero improvement week to week. Can someone put another set of eyes on this and see if we're simply just missing something? Results for all 30 of our tracked keywords, zero are in the top 50! I would guess this was an algorithm penalty, but it has been 3 months now since we've made the changes and nothing is changing... not even a little bit! Any help/suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated. Thank you and enjoy Labor Day weekend!
Algorithm Updates | | Tosten0 -
Optimized site-wide internal links in footer - a problem?
Hello all - I am looking at a website with 8 heavily keyword optimized site-wide links in the footer. Yes, there are only 8 but it looks a bit spammy and I'm tempted to remove them. I imagine there's some possibility of a Google penalty too? What would your advice be? Thanks, Luke
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0 -
Why some sites doesn't get ranked in Google but in Bing and Yahoo
Few of my sites e.g. Business-Training-Schools.com and Ultrasoundtechnicians.com doesnt get much visits from Google but these sites get top ranked in Bing and Yahoo. I have tried searching for answer to these question but i did not find anything convincing.
Algorithm Updates | | HQP2 -
Should Your Keep Out Of Stock Item Active On Your Site ?
If you have sold out products that will never come back in stock. Should you remove the items and urls from your sitemap and site. Or should you keep them active with a sold out image. The purpose would be for search engines will think your site is larger due the products and amount of urls you have ?
Algorithm Updates | | TeamLogo0 -
Relevant site outranked by powerful un-relevant sites
One of my clients has a site in a niche market, and has been ranking well for years. Since the Penguin algorithm changes his site dropped and 4-5 other sites came out of nowhere to take to top spots. These are very large sites, but they are not really reliant to the search terms. Sure, they sell one or two of the niche products, but our site is dedicated to those products. The site has been updated since I took over on the site, and is well SEOed. The site in question still ranks 1st for the keywords in every other search engine imaginable. Has anyone else encountered this? If so, how did you combat it?
Algorithm Updates | | DavidWilsonSEO0 -
SinglePlatform's Restaurant Menu Across Web Properties vs "SEO-Optimized"
Surprised I wasn't able to find an existing answer given that SinglePlatform apparently serves 500,000 SMBs with menus that appear on over 150 publisher websites. Given Panda's razor-sharp intolerance for duplicate content, am I safe to assume that any claim of SinglePlatform's menu on a local restaurant being beneficial to your SEO is now spurious? If so, what's best way to handle this as a potential SEO liability while still having one of their nicely formatted restaurant menus on your site? For reference: http://www.openforum.com/articles/using-singleplatform-to-build-a-digital-presence Update May 7, 2012 Connected directly with the folks at SinglePlatform, and the answer here is a lot simpler than my over-thinking of it. The menu usually sits within an iFrame or widget so that's that. But the ability to truthfully show an up-to-date menu for any given establishment is a legit way to address the healthy amount of local search intent that seems to be directed at exactly that. Overall a pretty slick platform, looking forward to seeing how they grow into the SMB, local & mobile in the coming months, I think the space is ripe to benefit from products/services that take advantage of these sorts of economies of scale.
Algorithm Updates | | mgalica0 -
High bounce rates from content articles influencing our rankings for rest of site
We have a large content article section on our e-commerce site that receives a lot of visits but also have very high bounce rates. We are wondering if this is hurting the rest of our site's rankings. **When I say bounce rates I mean what ever metrics Google is using to determine quality content (specifically after the Panda update). ** We are trying to determine if having the content articles on our domain hurts us. We only have the content articles for link building.
Algorithm Updates | | seozachz0