Desktop vs. Mobile Website - ranking impact

[tomchu]

Working on develop mobile pages using dynamic serving method, we are planing on only develop number of important pages (not the whole site) to be mobile friendly. To keep the consistency of the user experience, the new mobile site will only have internal links to pages that are mobile friend.

Questions:

If an existing non-mobile page ranking #1 on mobile SERP today, this page will not have a mobile friendly version, and will not link in the mobilefriendly site. will there be any impact to the ranking. Assuming: When Google mobile/Smartphone bots will not see a link to this page. The page will still accessible to Google desktop bots.

[bridget.randolph]

Hi Tom, this will likely impact your mobile rankings, as the smartphone crawler is the one which primarily feeds the mobile index. Best practice would say to make the mobile content as close to the desktop version as possible, but I understand that sometimes the resources are simply not available.

My concern would be that if you remove all internal links to the pages, the crawler will no longer find that page in new crawls and may eventually remove it from the mobile index, or may discount the importance of the page. Of course, if it isn't mobile friendly, you may end up losing rankings anyway if competitors create a more mobile-friendly experience.

A couple thoughts:

• is the page getting valuable traffic from that position 1 ranking? If so, I'd strongly suggest including it on your list of pages to make mobile-friendly. If not, perhaps it doesn't matter if it loses the high ranking.

• you could create a sitemap which includes those pages, so that the crawler can discover them even if they're not linked to internally. I don't know that this will prevent a negative impact but it could aid discovery.

Hope that helps.