Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Pugh,

Glad to hear it! Yes, you should also implement the tag on your homepages.

Hi Chris,

Don't use two separate pages for these queries - they are effectively the same (just a different wording for the same thing).

As the other commenters have noted, these terms are very similar and given the way Google is continuously moving towards semantic search and understanding concepts/topics rather than strict keyword matching, you should easily be to target both terms with a single page. The only reason not to do this would be if 'attorney' and 'lawyer' were actually two totally different services but as far as I know that is not the case, they're simply synonyms (at least in layperson's terms - even if there's a technical distinction presumably your target audience won't be likely to know or care).

Creating two different pages for what is basically the same topic will therefore not be useful to users and could get you in trouble with Google - at the very least you'll be confusing the search engine as it won't know which one is more relevant, and you'll be splitting any potential link equity you might get to those pages.

Hi Romaro,

Migrating from a separate mobile version of a site to a version which shares the same URL should work like any other domain migration.

You should 301 the old URLs to the equivalent page on the new version, and remove the switchboard tag code from the desktop pages.

Hope that helps!

Hi Francis,

They should be different sessions, they could be the same type of device or even the same device used in a different way.

There is also a report which will tell you exactly what devices were used, which might be helpful.

Hi Gaston,

App store optimization is pretty straightforward, and making sure that your title and description are well optimized is a great starting point. Other app store ranking factors which are very important are number of downloads and positive reviews, so anything you can do to encourage more downloads and more positive reviews (as long as you remain within app store guidelines) should help your app store rankings. I'm not currently aware of any 'external' (i.e. non-app store) factors such as social media or links. You can also set up app indexation if you have website content which is the same as your app content, and this can help with discovery.

You may also find this presentation from Emily Grossman to be useful: http://www.slideshare.net/Suzzicks/app-store-optimization-smx-munich-emily-grossman

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.

Hi Johannes,

I've understood your question to be about how to treat a site which uses dynamic serving for mobile content. Is this correct?

If your site keeps the same URLs for mobile and desktop versions, but serves different content based on user agent, then you will simply need to include a Vary-HTTP header. You can learn more about that here.

Hi Judd,

If you are only hiding these elements on the mobile view, this shouldn't cause an issue from a rankings perspective. You will want to make sure that they can access your CSS file (sometimes CSS files are blocked from crawlers).

It is possible that having it hidden will mean they discount that content slightly for the mobile version, but as long as they know it's a mobile version of the desktop site they will primarily take the desktop signals into consideration when it comes to rankings (with a small boost for mobile-friendliness in the mobile SERPs).

Once the mobile-first index rolls out this will change but they have stated that with mobile-first indexing, hiding content for space reasons won't negatively impact how they weight that content, so that shouldn't affect your approach practically speaking.

I have to disagree with the above.

Google absolutely can view mobile content, in fact they have a separate crawler that spoofs a mobile user agent in order to crawl mobile content. They may not have a separate mobile index of that content, but that has nothing to do with whether they view, crawl, and index mobile pages. We know that they do, in fact, given that whether a page is mobile-friendly is a rankings factor for mobile search results.

To answer your question - having the content collapsed shouldn't be a problem as long as the content is viewable with Javascript and CSS disabled. If Javascript is required to expand the collapsed content, the mobile crawler may not be able to see this content. You may want to test the page(s) with the Mobile-friendly Testing Tool and also try a Fetch and Render (for Smartphone) of the mobile page, to see how Google sees the page(s).

Hi romaro,

From my understanding, using these tags as part of a mobile XML sitemap is not necessary and in fact, Google don't recommend having a separate mobile sitemap: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-sitemaps-20137.html

Instead, for a dynamically served site, the important things are:

• Use the Vary HTTP header to signal your changes depending on the user-agent.
• Detect user-agent strings correctly.

You can read more about Google's guidelines for dynamic serving here: https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/dynamic-serving

Hi James,

Great question! My two cents would be as follows:

Firstly, I'm assuming that there is no way that you can make the responsive pages show up with the same domain as the current non-responsive site.

I'm guessing that you are building these pages on a different platform than the main site, but it is possible to use multiple platforms on a single domain (for instance, many websites build their blog on Wordpress and their main site using something different) - so I'm curious about why in this case you are choosing to make it a totally separate domain.

Assuming that this is the only way to do it, my first question would be: are these pages something that would be indexed normally on the main site? You mention they are 'Action' pages - search engines may not need to index transaction pages, for example, where the only purpose is to submit a payment or sign up for something. Unless you also expect these pages to rank as entry pages, but if users are navigating to these pages primarily from a different landing page, they may not be relevant to search engines at all.

If this is the case, and you are still concerned about appearing to send users to a different website, you could consider making the donate button to these pages initially link to a page on the existing domain (like www.maindomain.org/secure) which could then immediately redirect to the secure version. You could nofollow this link and block the transaction pages on the other domain from search (I usually see no reason to have purely transactional pages indexed, but I may be missing some context in this case.) However, this may run the risk of looking like you are trying to do something sneaky with redirects.

You could also include a note on the first page (the one the user is on before being taken to the secure site), next to that 'donate'/'signup' button/link that states "by clicking this link, you will be taken to our secure platform at 'domain.com' to complete your donation/signup".

I do like the idea of including the name of the charity in this secondary domain if possible, to help make it clear that they are connected. You could optimize the pages' meta data to include the name of the charity as well.

I don't believe there is a negative consequence (generally speaking) to sending a user off-site - unless you appear to be running some sort of 'doorway' page scheme, or using sneaky redirects to show Google one thing and the user something else. My one caveat: I'm not sure what you mean by "booting" the user- I could see it potentially seeming problematic if the user is automatically sent somewhere without choosing to navigate to the other domain...it could even fall under the category of 'malicious behavior'. But as long as the user is choosing to click on a link that takes them to a 'donate' or 'sign up' page, even if it's hosted on a different domain, I don't see that creating a major issue for Google.

Hi Micey, Roman's overview is good, if you want more detailed explanations and recommendations I suggest reading Cindy Krum's 3 part series on her MobileMoxie blog:

• https://www.mobilemoxie.com/blog/understanding-mobile-first-indexing-13-immediate-impact-seo/
• https://www.mobilemoxie.com/blog/understanding-mobile-first-indexing-23-long-term-impact-seo/
• https://www.mobilemoxie.com/blog/googles-mobile-first-architecture-options-for-seo/

So glad if it's useful!