90 Digital CEO Nick Garner talks about mobile rankings, in this edition of CalvinAyre.com’s SEO Tip of the Week.
Summary: mobile rankings are essentially a replica of desktop rankings with some variations. This is because links are still a very valuable signal for Google and the overwhelming majority of links are placed to and from non-mobile websites. Of course because of Google’s mobile update, there is a growing divergence between mobile and desktop results, but this is not to do with links, It’s to do with mobile friendliness.
Tip: if you have a separate mobile site, don’t bother link building to it. It’s better to focus your link acquisition on your main website and make sure that Google know your mobile site is from mobile users only.
Google gives some very useful advice on how to configure separate websites with the right meta data:
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/separate-urls?hl=en
Essentially you set up a redirect in the webpage stating where the mobile version of your page is:
Annotation in the HTML
On the desktop page (http://www.example.com/page-1), add:
<link rel=”alternate” media=”only screen and (max-width: 640px)”
href=”http://m.example.com/page-1″ >
and on the mobile page (http://m.example.com/page-1), the required annotation should be:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/page-1″ >
This rel=”canonical” tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required.
Annotation in sitemaps
We support including the rel=”alternate” annotation for the desktop pages in sitemaps like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:xhtml=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/page-1/</loc>
<xhtml:link
rel=”alternate”
media=”only screen and (max-width: 640px)”
href=”http://m.example.com/page-1″ />
</url>
</urlset>
The required rel=”canonical” tag on the mobile URL should still be added to the mobile page’s HTML.
Nick Garner is founder of 90 Digital, the well-known and respected iGaming search marketing agency.
Nick is obsessed with SEO and whatever it takes to rank sustainably on Google.
