Mobile site not ranking

[lfrazer]

Hello,

Our main site ranks well for all the keyword terms, and yet, our mobile site is buried. It is a "m." configuration, and I am wondering if it is a question of not using the correct programming language to get it there? Or if the redirects to the main site should relate differently? I have tried to read up on the topic of mobile site SEO and cannot find (or understand) the answer? Could someone please help?

Thanks so much in advance!

[Shawn_Huber]

If you have a mobile equivalent page to your desktop page, make sure to redirect your mobile users to that page. Make sure that you do not redirect all users to the m. homepage, that creates a poor customer experience which Matt Cutts has said will result in poor rankings for your mobile site.

Make sure you use the correct canonical tagging between the mobile and desktop pages. GWT talks about the correct use of these tags here https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

[NakulGoyal]

Denise

If you'd like to share/post your URL, I am sure somebody (including myself) maybe able to look and help diagnose the exact cause in your situation.

[lfrazer]

Thanks so much for your responses. Unfortunately, I am not entirely comfortable sharing our urls in the public forum. Would you be willing to receive a private message with the url? Or if there is a better way?

Thanks so much again

[Aleyda]

Hi Denise,

The first thing to do is to make sure that Google mobile/smartphone crawlers are able to correctly find and index the mobile subdomain, which is from what you describe the issue you have. In order to do this, you should verify:

• How your mobile site crawled by Google mobile/smartphone crawlers. You can do it with individual mobile pages going to the "Fetch as Google" option in Google Webmaster Tools and also crawl your whole site with Screaming Frog using the mobile user agents (you can select it by going to the "User Agent" option in the "Configuration" section). Like this you will be able to check if the mobile crawlers are able to find the correct site version and all of the URLs or if they are incorrectly redirected.
• If you have added canonical tags pointing from the mobile pages to the desktop ones without adding the "rel alternate" tags pointing from the desktop URLs to the mobile versions, as specified here. Or if you're not correctly using the canonical annotations placed in your mobile URLs in any other way too!
• If you are disallowing the m. subdomain with a robots.txt by mistake.
• If you are noindexing the pages in the m subdomain with the meta robots tag by mistake.

I hope this helps!

Aleyda

[lfrazer]

Thanks all for your answers. I have read the same about redirecting, but our main site and our mobile site are very different: by both content and layout, as well as url naming structure. If a mobile version of the desktop page is completely different, do I need to do redirects and canonicalization? (i.e. home page on mobile site is completely different from home page on desktop, but both represent the same company). Thanks again for all your help!!!!