The birth of responsive web pages seems to perfectly solve the problem that web pages are suitable for browsing on devices of different sizes. But for some special reason, sometimes there is a situation where the content visible on mobile devices is different from that on desktop devices. Will such pages affect SEO performance? Will it affect search rankings? This article will reveal the answer.
In what general situation is the content visible to mobile devices different from desktop devices?
Recently, in the webmaster help exchange group, a netizen asked: "The content visible on mobile devices and desktop devices is different, will it affect SEO?"
First, even with fully responsive web pages, it is common to have different content. For example, some content is not suitable for display on small-sized screens, so many designers will use CSS properties to hide this part on small-sized screens.
As a result, the content displayed on the desktop is not exactly the same as the content displayed on the mobile device.
Another common situation is the sidebar of a web page. Some designers hide the sidebar on mobile devices, or show a different sidebar.
There are many reasons for this, but in short, this situation is very common.
Responsive Web Design (RWD)
Responsive Web Design (RWD)
Will it affect SEO?
Generally speaking, we talk about SEO, mainly for Baidu and Google, the former is the largest search engine in China, and the latter is the largest search engine in the world.
Baidu Search Indexes Mobile and Desktop Webpages Separately
In Baidu search engine, mobile search and desktop search are separate, which correspond to m.baidu.com and www.baidu.com respectively.
Baidu's indexing mechanism also distinguishes the two. Mobile and desktop web indexing are two different things. After the same URL is indexed by desktop search, mobile web pages may not be indexed by mobile search. Search ranking is also the difference between the two.
Then in Baidu search, it doesn't matter that the content visible on mobile devices and desktop devices is different, because Baidu treats them differently. But the premise is that the main content does not have a wide range of differences.
In the site attributes of the Baidu search resource platform , Baidu has made it clear that the site types include: PC station, mobile station, PC/mobile station, PC and mobile can have a corresponding relationship, but they will be included and ranked separately.
Google adopts a mobile-first strategy
The first choice for Chinese site SEO is Baidu, foreign trade sites or English sites should pay more attention to Google rankings.
It's been a few years since Google started indexing mobile-first sites.
When Google uses "mobile-first indexing" for a domain, Googlebot crawls it more often and also updates the domain's version in Google's index to its mobile version.
So, the default is what is seen on mobile devices, and web designers should design it with that in mind. For the corresponding desktop content, that is: additional, or understood as added value.
Google recommends ensuring that the mobile and desktop versions of the same site contain exactly the same content (including text, images, videos, links), metadata (title and description, robots meta tags), and all structured data. A small amount of unimportant advertising information or icons, etc., can be slightly different.
At the same time, Google discourages the use of separate mobile URLs (often referred to as "m."), as Google believes that this is a way of building problems and confusion, both for search engines and for users.
Summarize
For Baidu, the PC station and the mobile station can be distinguished, even if it is not a responsive design, it is even feasible to design the mobile station separately with a domain name prefix such as "m.". Baidu only needs to clarify the correspondence between the PC station and the mobile station, because it will treat them differently.
On the other hand, Google wants the mobile version to be the same as the desktop version. If there is a small difference, the mobile version will also be the preferred standard webpage. The true mobile first
