Mobile: Mobile Alternate Link

Pages that contain a rel=”alternate” link element to a mobile version.

While this is an acceptable set up, it means serving different HTML to each device on separate URLs. This can often be less efficient than a responsive design approach.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

To populate this filter ‘Mobile Alternate’ must be selected via ‘Config > Spider > Crawl’.

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Mobile’ tab and ‘Mobile Alternate Link’ filter.

Use the lower ‘Outlinks’ tab and ‘Mobile Alternate’ link type filter to see the mobile version of the URL.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when pages have a rel=”alternate” link element with a ‘media’ attribute suggesting the website has separate mobile URLs.

How To Fix

Consider moving to a responsive web design approach in the future, which is recommended by Google as typically it’s the easiest to implement and maintain.

Ensure the mobile versions of URLs are correctly canonicalised to the desktop equivalents.