Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
M.ExampleSite vs mobile.ExampleSite vs ExampleSite.com
-
Hi,
I have a call with a potential client tomorrow where all I know is that they are wigged-out about canonicalization, indexing and architecture for their three sites:
The sites are pretty large... 350k for the mobiles and 5 million for the main site. They're a retailer with endless products. They're main site is not mobile-responsive, which is evidently why they have the m and mobile sites. Why two, I don't know.
This is how they currently hand this:
What would you suggest they do about this? The most comprehensive fix would be making the main site mobile responsive and 301 the old mobile sub domains to the main site. That's probably too much work for them. So, what more would you suggest and why?
Your thoughts? Best... Mike
P.S.,
Beneath my hand-drawn portrait avatar above it says "Staff" at this moment, which I am not. Some kind of bug I guess.
-
Hi Donna,
Thanks for all the help. I really appreciate it.
Best... Mike
-
Give them two options in a grid format:
(1) do nothing;
(2) redirect mobile to desktop
To the right of that, use two columns to convey pros and cons.
I guess you could do nothing and measure the impact for a few months, comparing this year to last. If things don't look good, then execute option 2. Might be hard to isolate the impact of the mobile index versus anything else though, but it's probably the best you can do.
And then there's the 3rd option... go responsive, but as you've said, you don't have time or budget for that unfortunately.
-
Hi Donna,
Thanks for the speedy reply. Yes, the thing that makes me nervous about that recommendation from the article is how do I even begin to weigh the odds on it being a net gain and then convey it to management? I mean, it's one thing for me to think, "yeah, let's roll the dice" and another to convey the trade-offs to a very typical management in something like numbers.
Thank you for noticing my avatar portrait. I did it over a Summer in the south of France. It will probably be worth a fortune once I am gone and regarded as a giant of the early 21st century world of art.
I wrote Moz about the "Staff" thing and it looks like they deleted the title... all titles really.
Best... Mike
-
What you have to weigh is the user impact. How much traffic are you currently getting from mobile devices? Will the desktop version of the website look awful, be hard to interact with or understand on a mobile phone or tablet device? You'll also lose the "mobile friendly" designation which might lower your rankings and click-thru rates.
It's a trade-off decision only you can make.
PS - I don't see "Staff" under your cool avatar.
-
Hi Donna,
Thanks for the insight and resource. What do you think of while waiting for the next year mobile responsive site, to 301 the two existing mobile sites to the desktop site? How would one begin to estimate the effect of that? Thanks, again.
Best... Mike
-
Michael,
I read a helpful article that touched on this exact topic yesterday. It's https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mobile-first-index-actually-mean/178017/ . As you've already pointed out, a responsive solution is best, but if the website's mobile and desktop content are the same, you may not have to do anything right away.
Check it out.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is there a benefit to changing .com domain to .edu?
Hey All! I'm wondering if there is any benefit (or if benefit could possibly outweigh the cost) to changing a domain from .com to a new .edu domain. The current .com domain has decent credibility already, and the .edu will have never been used before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | frankandmaven1 -
URL structure - Page Path vs No Page Path
We are currently re building our URL structure for eccomerce websites. We have seen a lot of site removing the page path on product pages e.g. https://www.theiconic.co.nz/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html versus what would normally be https://www.theiconic.co.nz/womens-clothing-tops/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html Should we be removing the site page path for a product page to keep the url shorter or should we keep it? I can see that we would loose the hierarchy juice to a product page but not sure what is the right thing to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ashcastle0 -
Mobile Googlebot vs Desktop Googlebot - GWT reports - Crawl errors
Hi Everyone, I have a very specific SEO question. I am doing a site audit and one of the crawl reports is showing tons of 404's for the "smartphone" bot and with very recent crawl dates. If our website is responsive, and we do not have a mobile version of the website I do not understand why the desktop report version has tons of 404's and yet the smartphone does not. I think I am not understanding something conceptually. I think it has something to do with this little message in the Mobile crawl report. "Errors that occurred only when your site was crawled by Googlebot (errors didn't appear for desktop)." If I understand correctly, the "smartphone" report will only show URL's that are not on the desktop report. Is this correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Subdomains vs directories on existing website with good search traffic
Hello everyone, I operate a website called Icy Veins (www.icy-veins.com), which gives gaming advice for World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, two titles from Blizzard Entertainment. Up until recently, we had articles for both games on the main subdomain (www.icy-veins.com), without a directory structure. The articles for World of Warcraft ended in -wow and those for Hearthstone ended in -hearthstone and that was it. We are planning to cover more games from Blizzard entertainment soon, so we hired a SEO consultant to figure out whether we should use directories (www.icy-veins.com/wow/, www.icy-veins.com/hearthstone/, etc.) or subdomains (www.icy-veins.com, wow.icy-veins.com, hearthstone.icy-veins.com). For a number of reason, the consultant was adamant that subdomains was the way to go. So, I implemented subdomains and I have 301-redirects from all the old URLs to the new ones, and after 2 weeks, the amount of search traffic we get has been slowly decreasing, as the new URLs were getting index. Now, we are getting about 20%-25% less search traffic. For example, the week before the subdomains went live we received 900,000 visits from search engines (11-17 May). This week, we only received 700,000 visits. All our new URLs are indexed, but they rank slightly lower than the old URLs used to, so I was wondering if this was something that was to be expected and that will improve in time or if I should just go for subdomains. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | damienthivolle0 -
Location.href vs href?
I just got off a Google Hangout with John Mueller and was left a little confused about his response to my question. If I have an internal link in a div like widgetwill it have the same SEO impact as widget John said that as you are unable to attribute a nofollow in an onclick event it would be treated as a naked link and would not pass pagerank but still be crawled. Can anyone confirm that I understood it correctly? If so should all my links that have such an onclickevent also have an html ahref in the too? Such as widget Many times it is more useful for the customer to click on any area of a large div and not just the link to get to the destination intended? Clarification on this subject would be very useful, there is nothing easily found online to confirm this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Duplicate Content www vs. non-www and best practices
I have a customer who had prior help on his website and I noticed a 301 redirect in his .htaccess Rule for duplicate content removal : www.domain.com vs domain.com RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnvoyWeb
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com/$1 [R=301,L,NC] The result of this rule is that i type MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com in the browser and it redirects to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com I wonder if this is causing issues in SERPS. If I have some inbound links pointing to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some pointing to MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, I would think that this rewrite isn't necessary as it would seem that Googlebot is smart enough to know that these aren't two sites. -----Can you comment on whether this is a best practice for all domains?
-----I've run a report for backlinks. If my thought is true that there are some pointing to www.www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some to the www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, is there any value in addressing this?0 -
301 or 302 Redirects to Mobile Site
When it's detected that a mobile device is accessing the site it has the ability to redirect from www.example.com to m.example.com. Does it make more sense to employ a 301 or 302 redirect here? Google says a 301 but does not explain why (although usually I stick to "when in doubt, 301") . It seems like a 302 would prevent passing link juice to the mobile site and having mobile-optimized results also showing up in Google's index. What is the preference here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOTGT0 -
Is it worth switching from .net to .com if you own both domain names
For over 20 years the company I work for has used www.company.net as their TLD, because we could not register www.company.com at that time. However, currently we also own www.company.com www.company.com has a 301 re-direct to www.company.net We are a global company, and market leader in our industry. Our company name is associated with the product we make, and our competitors use our company name as their targeted keywords to attract visitors to their sites because our company name is synonym with the product we and they make. As we are a global company we also have lots of TLDcc's. The email address of all our employees worldwide have a .net email address extension. Would you advice switching from www.company.net to www.company.com??? And if so, what would be the reasons for this switch. Would it only be for branding purposes? Looking forward to some insights before taking on such an invasive switch (because of the switch of all email addresses of employees worldwide). Best regards, Astrid Groeneveld
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cordstrap0