I have a site which has support for custom themes (the same content, but different HTML, CSS, graphics), e.g. default theme, mobile theme etc.
Themes are switched via request params (?theme=mobilie) and saved in user session (database).
How should I serve those themes to search engine bots? Should I allow to crawl themes other than default as well? robots noindex nofollow, canonical tags in head?
ok, themes and mobile versions are two different beasts, lets start with themes
lets say you have a ?theme=black and a ?theme=white theme and a default theme.
google does not care about your themes, as different themes just offer the same content in blue (or black, or whatever). this is a typical case of douplicate content.
so if you want to offer the users this option you should save it in the session.
www.example.com/?theme=black -> sets theme in session -> redirect HTTP 301 to -> www.example.com/
the "link" the users clicks should best be an external javascript (so that google can't easily discover that redirect link)
<span onclick="changeTheme('black')">Black</span>
so basically you offer google just the default version of your site, hide the themes (as they do not offer different content for google).
ok, about the mobile case.
if the HTML of the mobile site is optimized for mobile devices you might want to offer it to googlebot mobile.
so you could do user agent detection (is this a mobile site) and redirect your mobile users to a mobile site i.e.: m.example.com (if it's a site optimized like this http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=72462&from=40348&rd=1 and not only a smartphone optimized page) - then you should redirect googlebot mobile (not googlebot, just googlebot mobile) also to m.example.com (there is a whole chapter in googles seo guideline on how to do this http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf )
Related
I've developed a web browsing app based on a UIWebView. All good until iOS 9 and the new way it handles universal links. For some reasons, when the user touch a link, I want him to stay in my browser instead of switching to the associated app (Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, etc.). Is there a way to do that?
I have created a custom website using the Magento platform (No pre-defined theme is used). This is a completely created from the scratch. Now after developing the website, some slider in homepage is not displaying properly in the mobile version in addition to other pages. Can you guys help me out?. I am fine to buy an extension or do any other minor changes, so that I can go-live with my website immediately.
Have you checked out themes there in magento commerce?
Also tryout inspect element from browser to rule out syntactic errors
All the Best
KK
Making a EXISTING CMS site compatible for mobile site NOT REDIRECT
Hi All.
I am currently creating a mobile version of an expression engine site that we use.
I am having problems with this, because typically I can just use media quires, or use redirect scripts.
However, the layout of the mobile site will be completely different from the desktop, so I can't just fiddle with a media quires for the CSS (as site just looks to different).
I was thinking of using a javascript to wipe the code or markup (php) if the device is mobile BUT it would mean perhaps loading two versions of code anytime a page loads up (not good for mobile). Eg one code for desktop and another for mobile.
I can't change the file names eg (mobile_index) because it is a CMS and the links wont link up correctly. I have tried this a few times , and also editing the .HTACCESS file, but it simply didnt work.
So if anyone knows how do I change the code of a page if the device mobile, but cant change file name, directory or any of that :-)
Cheers
Daragh
Why no redirect? If I was in your position, which I was a few months ago, I would handle this totally different:
Install Multiple Site Manager by ExpressionEngine: http://expressionengine.com/user_guide/cp/sites/index.html
Add another site -- mobile
Give it a proper domainname like m.domain.com
Give it its own template group
... and redirect with http://github.com/sebarmeli/JS-Redirection-Mobile-Site/
Now you can manage both installations from the same CMS and both installations can access existing channels, modules, extensions and members. This will keep your code fast and clean.
Adding a bunch of conditionals will only slow down installation.
Actually you could mess with media queries - it's the most flexible. JS is really overkill for something like this. At larger sizes, UL>LI menus could appear, and at smaller sizes they could be hidden (display:none) and swapped to select lists; divs can be replaced, elements dropped or resized. I also combine them with different snippets or embeds so you can tailor the content out as well.
You might try something like MX Mobile Device Detect. It gives you some variables that can detect if the user is on a mobile device that you could use in conditionals in your templates.
Many of the web sites have mobile compliant pages for mobile browsers. We have a few URLs and we want to know whether the pages pointed to by these URLs have mobile compliant pages. So opened all these URLs in a browser on a mobile and checked whether the browser is loading a huge page or small mobile friendly page. Is this the correct way of checking or are there better ways of doing it?
Use any smartphone simulators for iphone http://www.testiphone.com/
If I have an iPhone version of my site, what are the things I need to make sure of so it doesn't interfere with SEO?
I've read quite a bit now about cloaking and sneaky javascript redirects, and am wondering how this fits into iPhone and Desktop websites playing together.
If my iPhone site has a totally different layout, where say the Desktop site has a page with 3 posts and 10 images all on the page, and my iPhone site makes that 2 pages, one with the posts, one with the images (trying to think up an example where the structure's decently different), that's probably not best practice for SEO, so should I just tell google not to look at the mobile site? If so, and assuming my client would like to automatically redirect mobile users to the iPhone site (I'm familiar with the id of taking them to the regular page with a link to the mobile version instead), how do I not make this look like cloaking?
Google actually has a separate index and crawler for mobile content. So all you need to do is design your URLs in such a way that you can exclude googlebot from the mobile pages and googlebot-mobile from the regular pages in robots.txt.
Certainly you have the option of telling the search engines to not look at the mobile page. I would leave it though because you never know who is looking for something specific and maybe Google will prefer certain pages over others for mobi users.
If the 2 pages on mobi make sense to the visitor then I would not worry about it for SEO. If you are redirecting based on mobi then I don't see how the search engines could think you are cloaking, but if you want to be totally sure I suggest using CSS to show different information based on Media type.
The only problem I can think of would be of duplicate content. The SEs may see both pages and not rank one as highly because it likes what it sees on the other page. There is no penalty other than the fact that one page is more interesting than the other and may get better rankings whereas the other drops in rank. If you are making two separate pages it would be an opportunity to tune your information to specific details and maybe get hits for both, but if you are using CSS then it will rank as one page.