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Duplicate Content & Mobile Websites

A serious problem can arise when you have duplicate content issues; but due to improper website design/configuration or more specifically, poor mobile website set-up by your ‘web guy’, you won’t even be aware of how much damage your site is inflicting on your SEO & overall searchability.

A lot of people are aware of the fact that Google hates duplicate content and depending on the amount of it that your website has, will depend on the severity of the SEO ‘penalty’ that is applied to your website as it pertains to showing up in various search queries.

First off, if you are thinking about updating your website to incorporate mobile capabilities, please just do it; but in regards to duplicate content as it pertains to mobile websites, it can happen in a couple different ways.

As a point of note, when I’m speaking about mobile, I’m referring to tablets and smartphones – not feature phones.

  1. Responsive Design: This is the ideal way to deal with mobile device visitors to your site as it serves up all of the information, in the proper format, to a mobile user appropriate to their specific smartphone.  So long as the Java script and the CSS are built to properly handle mobile users you shouldn’t have any duplicate content issues.  The Java script in CSS cannot be blocked.  If it is, Google won’t be able to follow the java script and therefore won’t be able to easy know if the site is responsive design or not.  If they can’t figure it out, they may not give you all the SEO credit that your website should receive.
  2. Of course Responsive Design is ideal but the other way to have mobile capabilities on your website is to have two versions of your site (m.yourdomain.com vs. yourdomain.com is one popular way to do this).   In this example, when the hosting server determines that a visitor is a mobile user, the m.yourdomain.com would be served up.  In order to eliminate potential duplicate content issues with this type of mobile website, the desktop version of your website needs to have a rel – alternative tag that points to the smartphone/mobile version as well as a rel – conical tag that tells the search engines that the content found on these mobile pages is the same as the desktop.
  3. You can also tell any smartphone user agents (ie. Googlebot vs. Googlebot-Mobile) that the subdomain is only for mobile users and therefore won’t be confused as to why there is duplicate content on another URL.

Google did a great job of explaining this in a recent post but unfortunately a lot of website designers are so worried about the pretty, they don’t realize just how important SEO is and how ignoring it, or not doing it properly, will negatively affect any SEO efforts that you do going forward.

As this blog entry speaks directly to duplicate content issues in regards to mobile websites, I haven’t even taken the time to reflect on a duplicate issue that a large percentage of website owners don’t even know is hurting them as they don’t even realize that what their web designer has done is SEO 101… yet they claim to ‘know’ SEO… but that is another rant I could go on and on about – again!

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