Mobile site content and main site content

[lfrazer]

Help, pls! I have one main site and a mobile version of that site (m.domain.com). The main site has more pages, more content, different named urls. The main site has consistently done well in Google. The mobile site has not: the mobile site is buried.

I am working on adding more content to the mobile site, but am concerned about duplicate content. Could someone pls tell me the best way to deal with these two versions of our site? I can't use rel=canonical because the urls do not correspond to the same names on the main site, or can I? Does this mean I need to change the url names, offer different content (abridged), etc? I really am at a loss as to how to interpret Google's rules for this. Could someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? Any help or tips would GREATLY appreciated!!!!!

Thanks!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Denise,

Without looking at your site, I just wonder if a simpler solution would be to have someone fiddle with the CSS on your site and make it Responsive, rather than having a second site to contend with? You will retain your normal site rankings then and just have the site render differently depending upon the type of device.

This is the route I take with all of my clients, so if this isn't an option, then I am sorry but someone else will have to chip in.

-Andy

[GPainter]

Hello,

I did write a lovely response but the moz errors have killed that off so here is the shorter version :

Google is pretty cleaver at knowing a mobile site from a desktop version so i wouldn't worry too much but i recommend you take a good look in:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/

you could also block the Google bot in your robots on your mobile site only allowing the mobile Google bot in (or visa versa)

Google bots - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943?hl=en

Hope that helps a bit.

[billhartzer]

Denise, I don't think you have too much to worry about when it comes to duplicate content. Google's crawler, Googlebot, has a mobile version and a desktop version: so you should be serving Googlebot's mobile version your mobile content and vice versa for the 'normal' desktop Googlebot.

That should generally take care of most of the duplicate content issues. I would, though, go ahead and take a look at this 2011 video from Matt Cutts and the link in the description that talks about mobile duplicate content issues.

[lfrazer]

Hi Andy,

I know! This is my preference, and yet I get the feeling from our programming team that it would be too much work.. But thanks for the response and recommendation!!! Knowing little about coding, is there a simplified way to go from two separate sites to one responsive one that I could pass along to my programmer?

Thanks again!

[lfrazer]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for your answer. I am wondering as per the guidelines in Google Developers on mobile sites if we should have a corresponding page on our m.website to our desktop version, and then show the alternate/canonical tags for each?

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

Do I understand that correctly? Right now, we have about 15 pages for our mobile site and 78 pages on our main site...

Thanks for any feedback you can offer!

[lfrazer]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your response. I did re-review this page and it looks like we need to expand our mobile site to include as many pages as our desktop site? Is this right? It used to be that mobile sites could have only a few pages and be fine... Any idea why now every mobile page url should correspond to an alternate desktop page url, or does it? That seems to be the only potential problem to me...

Thanks again!!!!

[GPainter]

Hi Denise,

you may find the recent Moz blog super helpful -

http://moz.com/blog/mobile-site-audit-checklist

[lfrazer]

Hi Chris,

Thanks. I have seen this checklist in my research. My question is this, do I use the same amount of pages for a mobile version of my site and use the appropriate canonical redirects in order to be found? Right now, I have a small fraction of pages for our mobile site than our desktop site-the only pages with a canonical to alternate redirect are the home pages. I have read all the pages on the developer aspect of Google, used various checklists, but cannot for some reason, find a clear enough answer to go with. Could you or someone else help?

Thanks

[GPainter]

Hi Denise,

I would say you should treat a mobile user with the same content as a desktop one as they are there for the same reason- to access your site.  Having said this you might find having just essential content for a user and a link to desktop for some of the other pages.

Obviously that's not helpful its down to preference. The way I would ask you to look at it is not from Google's point of view, but your users. What will give them the best experience?

If you want to rank the mobile site i would alter more content to be mobile optimized.