Interlinking vs. 'orphaning' mobile page versions in a dynamic serving scenario

[Eric_R]

Hi there,

I'd love to get the Moz community's take on this.

We are working on setting up dynamic serving for mobile versions of our pages. During the process of planning the mobile version of a page, we identified a type of navigational links that, while useful enough for desktop visitors, we feel would not be as useful to mobile visitors. We would like to remove these from our mobile version of the page as part of offering a more streamlined mobile page. So we feel that we're making a fine decision with user experience in mind. On any single page, the number of links removed in the mobile version would be relatively few.

The question is: is there any danger in “orphaning” the mobile versions of certain pages because links don’t exist pointing to those pages on our mobile pages?  Is this a legitimate concern, or is it enough that none of the desktop versions of pages are orphaned?  We were not sure whether it’s even possible, in Googlebot’s eyes, to orphan a mobile version of a page if we use dynamic serving and if there are no orphaned desktop versions of our pages. (We also plan to link to "full site" in the footer.)

Thank you in advance for your help,
Eric

[bridget.randolph]

Hi Eric,

That's a great question! To be safe I'd suggest adding an HTML sitemap page (for both the mobile and desktop versions) which includes links to all the pages on the site. That way you can be sure that Googlebot Mobile is able to crawl the full site.

Hope that helps!