Which will rank higher: Non-mobile friendly site in native language vs. mobile friendly global site in English?

[jennifer.new]

Hi, we are currently implementing a mobile site, e.g. m.company.com. The global mobile site will only be available in English.

We have local subsites of the desktop site, e.g. company.com/fr. The local subsites are not mobile friendly.

If a user does a search for a brand term in France, **which site will rank higher in SERPs? **If it will be the global site, is there anything we can do (other than making them mobile friendly) to make the local sites rank higher?

Would it be the mobile-friendly site, even though it is only in English, because the local site would be penalized for not being mobile friendly? Or would it be the local site, because Google will give priority to the fact that it's in French, which matches the language of the person searching?

[NickLeRoy]

Your site will in no way become penalized for not being mobile friendly.  "mobilgeddon" was an effort to get more people to switch to mobile friendly designs and is still only a factor within Google's algorithm.   You should be thinking about switching to mobile (responsive ideally) for a better user experience - not because of Google.

You mentioned that the global mobile version will only be available in English.  Does this mean you have other languages on the desktop site?  If so I would rely exclusively on the non-mobile pages utilizing the hreflang tag (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en) and then when you eventually make the other language pages mobile friendly switch the hreflang to point to those page.

Pointing your users in a different company expecting their native language to the mobile english only version I suspect would create extremely high bounce rates.  You would be best off (IMO) just sending them to the non-mobile but correct language desktop page regardless of search being desktop vs mobile.

[jennifer.new]

According to the client, the site is being penalized for not being mobile friendly; but there could be other reasons. The desktop site has 10-12 versions, set up as subdirectories.

If the native language site will come up first, the client is fine with doing nothing. If not, they want us to redirect the users as you described. But since we're still in development, we're not sure what the answer is.

Do you think it's most likely that the native language site would come up first?

The long-term plan is to create responsive sites, for better SEO and UX, so this is just a temporary interim solution.

[DirkC]

Hi Jennifer,

How can you still be in development and in the same time be "punished" for not having a mobile version?

To answer your question - Abercrombie is doing something similar as your client is doing. On the desktop version they have 5 languages - the mobile version is only English. If you search on Google.de (desktop) - you get the German version. If  you search Google.de on mobile - the titles in the search results are German - however the site which is displayed when you click on the links is the one that is optimised for mobile (= English version)

I guess this will be similar in your case - desktop searches will go to the translated version - the mobile searches will go to the mobile version (even if it's not in the language of the searcher).

Dirk

[jennifer.new]

In the Abercrombie case, the site that comes up in the search results is the EU mobile site, with German language. When I click on it, it seems that they are automatically redirecting me to abercrombie.com; not the English version of m.eu.abercrombie.com. I find automatic redirects annoying - in this case, I'm intentionally trying to hit the German site and I can't.

We are in development of the new global mobile site. The existing desktop site is being "punished" for not being mobile-friendly. Hence why we are creating a mobile site in the age of responsive design

[katemorris]

Lots going on here. First, let me clarify, your client's desktop content is only translated? They don't change the content and the offerings don't change by country? There is a very important distinction here. Language and country are two different things.

Regardless, if the mobile site is only in English, because of mobilegeddon, if they think they are penalized, it's because they lost mobile traffic or are seeing declines. This is only because there is not good mobile content in the users language. Once that is available, I expect the traffic will rise. It's not a penalty like duplicate content isn't a penalty, it is just not optimal.

For anyone doing brand searches, I think the answer is it depends. If Google thinks the user is okay with the English mobile site, they will show that. If the user has only ever searched in their particular language, and that's not available on mobile, they might show the desktop local site (better but not perfect) or they might test showing the English mobile site. I think you'll see both over time until the mobile issue is fixed.

[jennifer.new]

Thanks Kate. The content is very similar between countries, to the degree where I thought it was translated verbatim at first. Looking deeper, I see that there is some slight variation between offerings.

The client is only using language codes: en, it, fr - except in China, where they have two versions of the site (zh-hans and zh-en. The second code, zh-en, is incorrect).

All the content is set up under subdirectories, e.g. site.com/en rather than microsites en.site.com.

Does this change your judgment?

[katemorris]

No, it doesn't change my answer, but it's a good distinction to make. It sounds like the international expansion is in process. If the client needs geo-targeted content (sounds like they might), the countries need to be treated differently. Each subfolder as it's own site really. But it sounds like the translation is a good place to start for the time being.

For the mobile, my answer remains the same. There isn't anything other than making the translated content mobile or responsive that will help the traffic.