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.
Desktop & Mobile XML Sitemap Submitted But Only Desktop Sitemap Indexed On Google Search Console
-
Hi!
The Problem
We have submitted to GSC a sitemap index. Within that index there are 4 XML Sitemaps. Including one for the desktop site and one for the mobile site. The desktop sitemap has 3300 URLs, of which Google has indexed (according to GSC) 3,000 (approx). The mobile sitemap has 1,000 URLs of which Google has indexed 74 of them.
The pages are crawlable, the site structure is logical. And performing a Landing Page URL search (showing only Google/Organic source/medium) on Google Analytics I can see that hundreds of those mobile URLs are being landed on. A search on mobile for a longtail keyword from a (randomly selected) page shows a result in the SERPs for the mobile page that judging by GSC has not been indexed.
Could this be because we have recently added rel=alternate tags on our desktop pages (and of course corresponding canonical ones on mobile). Would Google then 'not index' rel=alternate page versions?
Thanks for any input on this one.
-
Hi Allison, any updates on this?
From my understanding, it is possible that Google is not indexing the mobile versions of pages if they are simply corresponding to the desktop pages (and indicated as such with the rel=alternate mobile switchboard tags). If they have that information they may simply index the desktop pages and then display the mobile URL in search results.
It is also possible that the GSC data is not accurate - if you do a 'site:' search for your mobile pages (I would try something like 'site:domain/m/' and see what shows up), does it show a higher number of mobile pages than what you're seeing in GSC?
Can you check data for your mobile rankings and see what URLs are being shown for mobile searchers? If your data is showing that mobile users are landing on these pages from search, this would indicate that they are being shown in search results, even if they're not showing up as "indexed" in GSC.
-
Apologies on the delayed reply and thank you for providing this information!
Has there been any change in this trend over the last week? I do know that subfolder mobile sites are generally not recommended by search engines. That being said, I do not feel the mobile best practice would change as a result. Does the site automatically redirect the user based on their device? If so, be sure Google is redirecting appropriately as well.
"When a website is configured to serve desktop and mobile browsers using different URLs, webmasters may want to automatically redirect users to the URL that best serves them. If your website uses automatic redirection, be sure to treat all Googlebots just like any other user-agent and redirect them appropriately."
Here is Google's documentation on best practices for mobile sites with separate URLs. I do believe the canonical and alternate tags should be left in place. It may be worth experimenting with the removal of these mobile URLs from the sitemap though I feel this is more of a redundancy issue than anything.
I would also review Google's documentation on 'Common Mobile Mistakes', perhaps there is an issue that is restricting search engines from crawling the mobile site efficiently.
Hope that helps!
-
Hi Paul and Joe
Thanks for the reply!
Responsive is definitely in the works...
In the meantime to answer:
-
GSC is setup for the mobile site. However its not on a subdomain, its a subdirectory mobile site. So rather than m.site.com we have www.site.com/m for the mobile sites. A sitemap has been submitted and thats where I can see the data as shown in the image.
-
Because the mobile site is a subdirectory site the data becomes a little blended with the main domain data in Google Search Console. If I want to see Crawl Stats for example Google advises "To see stats and diagnostic information, view the data for (https://www.site.com/)."
-
re: "My recommendation is to remove the XML sitemap and rely on the rel=alternate/canonical tags to get the mobile pages indexed. Google's John Mueller has stated that you do not need a mobile XML sitemap file." I had read this previously, but due to the nature of the sub-directory setup of the site, the mobile sitemap became part of the sitemap index...rather than having just one large sitemap.
Thoughts?
-
-
ASs joe says - set up a separate GSC profile for the mdot subdomain. The use that to submit the mdot sitemap directly if you wish. You'll get vastly better data about the performance of the mdot site by having it split out, instead of mixed into and obfuscated by the desktop data.
Paul
-
Hi Alison,
While this is a bit late, I would recommend moving to a responsive site when/if possible. Much easier to manage, fewer issues with search engines.
My recommendation is to remove the XML sitemap and rely on the rel=alternate/canonical tags to get the mobile pages indexed. Google's John Mueller has stated that you do not need a mobile XML sitemap file.
Also, do you have Google Search Console set up for both the m. mobile site and the desktop version? It does not seem so with all sitemaps listed in the one property in your screenshot. If not, I recommend setting this up as you may receive some valuable insights into how Google is crawling the mobile site.
I'd also review Google's Common Mobile Mistakes guide to see if any of these issues could be impacting your situation. Hope this helps!
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
-
Google tries to index non existing language URLs. Why?
Hi, I am working for a SAAS client. He uses two different language versions by using two different subdomains.
Technical SEO | | TheHecksler
de.domain.com/company for german and en.domain.com for english. Many thousands URLs has been indexed correctly. But Google Search Console tries to index URLs which were never existing before and are still not existing. de.domain.com**/en/company
en.domain.com/de/**company ... and an thousand more using the /en/ or /de/ in between. We never use this variant and calling these URLs will throw up a 404 Page correctly (but with wrong respond code - we`re fixing that 😉 ). But Google tries to index these kind of URLs again and again. And, I couldnt find any source of these URLs. No Website is using this as an out going link, etc.
We do see in our logfiles, that a Screaming Frog Installation and a-moz.groupbuyseo.org w opensiteexplorer were trying to access this earlier. My Question: How does Google comes up with that? From where did they get these URLs, that (to our knowledge) never existed? Any ideas? Thanks 🙂0 -
Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google?
Hi, we re-branded and launched a new website in February 2016. In June we saw a steep drop in the number of URLs indexed, and there have continued to be smaller dips since. We started an account with Moz and found several thousand high priority crawl errors for duplicate pages and have since fixed those with canonical tags. However, we are still seeing the number of URLs indexed drop. Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this. A good portion of our URLs have canonical tags because they are just events with different dates, but otherwise the content of the page is the same.
Technical SEO | | zasite0 -
How to remove all sandbox test site link indexed by google?
When develop site, I have a test domain is sandbox.abc.com, this site contents are same as abc.com. But, now I search site:sandbox.abc.com and aware of content duplicate with main site abc.com My question is how to remove all this link from goolge. p/s: I have just add robots.txt to sandbox and disallow all pages. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | JohnHuynh0 -
Will an XML sitemap override a robots.txt
I have a client that has a robots.txt file that is blocking an entire subdomain, entirely by accident. Their original solution, not realizing the robots.txt error, was to submit an xml sitemap to get their pages indexed. I did not think this tactic would work, as the robots.txt would take precedent over the xmls sitemap. But it worked... I have no explanation as to how or why. Does anyone have an answer to this? or any experience with a website that has had a clear Disallow: / for months , that somehow has pages in the index?
Technical SEO | | KCBackofen0 -
CDN Being Crawled and Indexed by Google
I'm doing a SEO site audit, and I've discovered that the site uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that's being crawled and indexed by Google. There are two sub-domains from the CDN that are being crawled and indexed. A small number of organic search visitors have come through these two sub domains. So the CDN based content is out-ranking the root domain, in a small number of cases. It's a huge duplicate content issue (tens of thousands of URLs being crawled) - what's the best way to prevent the crawling and indexing of a CDN like this? Exclude via robots.txt? Additionally, the use of relative canonical tags (instead of absolute) appear to be contributing to this problem as well. As I understand it, these canonical tags are telling the SEs that each sub domain is the "home" of the content/URL. Thanks! Scott
Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas0 -
Removing Redirected URLs from XML Sitemap
If I'm updating a URL and 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL, Google recommends I remove the old URL from our XML sitemap and add the new URL. That makes sense. However, can anyone speak to how Google transfers the ranking value (link value) from the old URL to the new URL? My suspicion is this happens outside the sitemap. If Google already has the old URL indexed, the next time it crawls that URL, Googlebot discovers the 301 redirect and that starts the process of URL value transfer. I guess my question revolves around whether removing the old URL (or the timing of the removal) from the sitemap can impact Googlebot's transfer of the old URL value to the new URL.
Technical SEO | | RyanOD0 -
Notice of DMCA removal from Google Search
Dear Mozer's Today I get from Google Webmaster tools a "Notice of DMCA removal" I'll paste here the note to get your opinions "Hello, Google has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that some of your materials allegedly infringe upon the copyrights of others. The URLs of the allegedly infringing materials may be found at the end of this message. The affected URLs are listed below: http://www.freesharewaredepot.com/productpages/Ultimate_Spelling__038119.asp" So I perform these steps: 1. Remove the page from the site (now it gives 404). 2. Remove it from database (no listed on directory, sitemap.xml and RSS) 3. I fill the "Google Content Removed Notification form" detailing the removal of the page. My question is now I have to do any other task, such as fill a site reconsideration, or only I have to wait. Thank you for your help. Claudio
Technical SEO | | SharewarePros0
