#Google updates crawl budget docs for large sites with differing mobile and desktop pages and links
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Google said it is best practice to have all links present on both mobile and desktop versions.
What changed. Google added a new bullet point to this section of the crawl budget documentation page:
“If your site uses separate HTML for mobile and desktop versions, provide the same set of links on the mobile version as you have on the desktop version. If it’s not possible to provide the same set of links on the mobile version, ensure that they’re included in a sitemap file. Google only indexes the mobile version of pages, and limiting the links shown there can slow down discovery of new pages.”
Why Google add this. Google wrote this to explain that if you do not do this, it can slow the crawl of your mobile pages. Google wrote:
“For large websites with separate HTML on mobile and desktop versions, the discovery of new pages can be slower if the mobile version does not include all the links that are present on the desktop version.”
Why we care. If you large site uses both a mobile and desktop version of the site and the links on some of those pages do not match, it can cause discovery issues for your new content. If you want to ensure everything is optimal and the speed of crawl is fine, make sure to have the content on those pages to be the same, including the links. You can always go with a responsive design to simply this in the future.
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.
In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the “US Search Personality Of The Year,” you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O’Clock.
Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.
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