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I'm really concerned about a design I have been handed by a designer. It changes the menu for mobile and desktop. On mobile you can only access the main categories, that will lead to all the content and sub links.

On desktop the menu can reveal more and therefore making it easier and faster to find your content.

I have used display:none to remove links in the mobile version. Links like social share is removed and sub links in the menu. Another thing is that I have made two "contact" links because I have to hide the one from mobile and place the other contact link in a sub header above the main navigation because of the design.

Is this a SEO problem or a Google penalty issue?

Prototype of website on live server: http://instagib.dk/

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Google expects differences between mobile and desktop sites. Even major differences, including differences in link structure, are not a problem.

Google crawls the web with different Googlebot user agents for mobile. As long as your server shows that version of Googlebot the same thing that your actual mobile users see, you don't have any penalty risk. It sounds like you are using responsive design, so there are no server side differences in the HTML code served to various user agents anyway.

Google's mobile development guide lays out the different ways to create a mobile site:

  • Responsive Web Design
  • Dynamic Serving
  • Separate URLs

Any of the three can be OK from an SEO standpoint.

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  • Nice:) Thank you for your answer. Nice to know that Google is willing you to design responsively.
    – Mikkel Madsen
    Jan 13, 2015 at 15:07

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