Does reducing content for mobile devices affect SEO?

[TiggerSpain]

Hi

I've been looking around the site to try and find a place to post this question - still not sure its the right place

I'm looking at stopping content being displayed on a mobile within Wordpress would this effect the SEO of a page by hiding 50% of the page. This would be viewed on ipads / desktop. I'm just concerned that with the site being crawled by G as a mobile site if I block this could it harm ranking chances ?

Cheers

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com],TiggerSpain !

google announced mobile first indexing [developers.google.com] about 2 years ago.
you should read about this to see how your decisions may affect your results.

there are several threads about this on WebmasterWorld.

[TiggerSpain]

thanks for the welcome

cheers I did try searching but couldn't find anything

[phranque]

here are a dozen WebmasterWorld threads with "mobile first index" in the title:
[google.com...]

[goodroi]

It depends on what content you are talking about.

Keyword-rich relevant text - Super valuable, keep it. Quality text isn't usually the source of problems.
Images - Can really slow down things. Potential for boosting UX & SEO if you cull them or get creative (compression, lazy loading, etc)
Footer/sidebar text - Likely ignored by users and can lead to bloated pages. Slimming down the mobile version can help.
Fancy Tools/Widgets - Could be smarter to remove or move to another page. Ask yourself are mobile users really using it or is it more used by desktop users.

[tangor]

All above, but also keep in mind you do not want to show different content for different devices, g might get the idea you are hiding things. :)

Curiosity compels me to ask: What is the rationale for hiding 50% of the page content for mobile users?

[lucy24]

Then again, you could take “mobile first” at face value, and look at it the other way around:

Your real site, your default site, is what mobiles see. Design it with that in mind.

Anything extra shown on bigger devices is just that: extra. Think of it as Added Value, on top of the baseline.

[TorontoBoy]

I, too, am curious as to why you would hide content from a specific type of device. The human (hopefully, maybe 50% of the time) reading the content is device independent.

Good content is good content. If your content is compelling enough that it does not render well on a phone but they want to read it, they'll find a more appropriate device.

[arikstudy1]

Is the disappearance of text in css considered by Google that the text is still on the page? Although this code is still there?

[lucy24]

G### is not stupid. If the css says not to display certain content when the viewport is below a certain size, then Mobile First means that the said content doesn't exist.

[tangor]

If the css says not to display certain content when the viewport is below a certain size, then Mobile First means that the said content doesn't exist.

And thus---to answer OPs question, does not enter in to SEO at all.

[Suraj]

Mobile friendliness is one of the ranking factors in the Google algorithm. Since most internet users search through their mobile devices.However, it also depends on where your potential users are searching. If they are using a mobile device to search, Google will rank a mobile-friendly website higher, but if they are searching on a desktop, it won't affect the ranking.

[explorador]

I'm looking at stopping content being displayed on a mobile within Wordpress would this effect the SEO of a page by hiding 50% of the page. This would be viewed on ipads / desktop. I'm just concerned that with the site being crawled by G as a mobile site if I block this could it harm ranking chances ?

Yes it will affect your traffic and rankings. Being practical, you'll have to check your stats first, in most cases these days, mobile traffic is higher as most people consume content via their mobile phones and ipads, and you would be stripping such content for them. For INTERACTION you might push users to move to desktop, but for consuming content that's not likely, people love the comfort of reading anywhere their phone.

I won't go into detail on the following, but it's open to discussion how much, when and where, content is indexed differently depending of mobile vs desktop and offered to the end user via search.

Why do you want to cut the content?